CHAPTER XIVSUNSHINE GLORIOUS
But Nathan had one more terrific experience to suffer before he was finished with the Russian bedlam,—an experience and an aftermath beside which all that has gone before—everything!—pales into insignificance and becomes as nothing. And like most stupendous experiences in life, it came when least expected, certainly unannounced.
Nathan reached that great tenth day of October, 1918.
“It was the turning point—the hinge!—of my whole life, Bill,” he has said to me since. “I wouldn’t have missed it for a million dollars, but whether I’d take a million dollars to go through with it again—it’s a question, Bill—it’s a question!”
At the Consulate the following morning he met Roach. The young courier was delighted with a companion the balance of that hectic journey. One week later they were on their way.
Nathan had recuperated quickly during that week. Plenty of food,plenty of soap and water, the chance to shave every morning—simple things—had given him a new lease on life.
Nathan had changed, anyway, during that year with the Czechs. Mental troubles had stopped bothering. He had far more to worry him than his culture. Despite his physical hardships, the young man had added weight. Hard, healthy exercise in the open, soldier fare, rough living, had toughened him. He was a stripling no longer. He had learned to walk erectly. His shoulders were square, almost burly. And his face——
Though Nathan knew it not, a whole life epilogue lay upon his features. He was bronzed to copper red with sunburn, wind-burn and snow-burn. At his temples was a faint sprinkling of gray. True, as Bernie had said, there was no woman in his life, and that also showed upon his features and in his strong, gray eyes. But Nathan had been through “a thousand measly little small-town hells” which can often take more from a man than a few big hells. He had lived above them. Then had come the few big hells also,—that autumn, winter and spring at Kolybelsk after the flight from Moscow. He had come through all that too—and lived. He would go on living. He had damned Russia and the war a hundred times, especially when poor Wiley’s surprised face came back to him with a body suddenly punctured by bullets; but what normal man without a heart of brass had not damned the war after seeing men die horribly? Still, that had not shaken Nathan’s faith in human nature. A peasant army gone mad was no criterion of the entire human race! And that Nathan had not lost faith in human nature showed in his face also. It was growing into a Lincolnesque face. Self-control, self-discipline, infinite patience, the capacity for fathomless tenderness. When I looked into Nathan’s features a year later and compared him with the fellow who had bade me good-by at the Paris railroad depot that sunny morning when old Caleb missed him by an hour, frankly I was shocked. But it was a thrilling shock. I felt a choke in my throat. Nathan’s face! A far, far cry from the little, freckled-blotched, snub-nosed countenance upturned to me that day when I belabored a barrel-stave on the fence boards in the yard of the Foxboro school. All that Nathan needed now was a great woman, an infinitely tender woman, a woman with a big soul, and there would be something rather glorious about my friend, though it is hard to say, looking back over the quite prosaic vicissitudes of his life, just wherein and why. It was a presentiment lying too deep for the intellect. It belonged in the realm of the emotions.
So Nathan started out of Irkutsk one morning with Roach—eastward, eastward—toward the greatest adventure in his life.
The country, up to the week of the fifth, had been riotous with the screaming yellows and flaming scarlets of autumn—not unlike New England—not unlike Vermont. Hour afterhour as the dilapidated train crawled infinitesimally across moorlands and steppes, through mountain defiles, along valley bottoms, around the edges of great inland lakes—always eastward, eastward, eastward—he sat in the door of the howling, bumping, empty freight car and drank in the glory of titanic Siberia, the undiscovered wonderland of the planet.
Vastness, strength, poetry, he saw in that land through which he traveled. It was the home of a race still primitive, though old as the world, with deep faith, with curiosity, with many passions, with suspicions, with fears, with heartache,—striving piteously to work out a social and economic problem as far above their grasp as God. It was a land of brown steppes, blue waters, purple mountains; that barbaric, borderland world where troglodytes lived with large-bodied women who might have ridden with the Valkyries out to meet Brünhilde. The very proximity of death gave outlines to that wonderful land; that lucid sadness which is the essence of the soul of Russia. Deserts, distances, lisps of forms and ideas, the powerful simplicities of souls already in Infinity,—and yet too, a land of junk and chaos almost crashed into wreckage along with the thing that man called Civilization.
Colors, colors, riotous colors! Its yellows were great tartaric life-motives, thwarted and defiled; its blacks were terrible doubts, hatreds, abuses and cruelties; its reds were the accouchement of a great people where a nation’s natal pains were griping amid the roar of war; its blues were for simple strengths which could endure all and still survive, and loves which could never quite fade from life’s horizons. Colors, colors, riotous colors! And Nathan—the colorist, the emotionalist, the mystic, the romancer—drank them in deeply and let them cleanse him from the Terror through which he had slipped. No—life could never be small and petty and landlocked and drab again.
It was time for snow now, yet the weather had remained steaming warm. Instead of snow there had been rain. For hours the train had crawled through vast infinities of depressing fog. The entire day of the ninth the car doors had been closed to keep out the dismal mist and chill. They had no fire. They could only sit on the floor of that rocking box-on-wheels and play the hours away with a deck of cards which Roach had somehow managed to keep in his luggage.About seven o’clock the night of the ninth Roach arose and opened the door.
“We’re going through a lot of hills,” he declared. “And my God! It’s dark as the devil’s pocket! I never saw such fog. You can almost taste it!”
The two spread their blankets on the cold, hard planking. They lay down, automatics within easy reach, and tried to sleep. It was torturous business.
“Well, old man,” cried Roach in grim humor, “if we don’t live to see morning, here’s good-by!”
They had employed such a “Good night” every evening since the fortunes of war had thrown them together. For the country was filled with bands of murderous Bolsheviki, striving to break through the Czech guard lines and cut the railroad at a vulnerable point in order to maroon enemy forces farther in-country.
“Same to you and many of them!” laughed Nat. And he pulled up his blanket to his chin, pillowed his arms behind his head and dozed off to the shrieking grind of the wheels.
Outside of one terrible shriek which Roach gave three hours later, they were the last words Nathan ever heard him utter.
My friend had dozed off—to dream as usual that he was back in Paris—in the box-shop with his father—going home to Milly and the Pine Street house furnished in mid-Victorian and Larkin Soap premiums—brooding over boyish troubles,—always introspecting—always worry-ridden—when in his dreams, half-way in the borderland of slumber, came a crash as though all hell had exploded and blown the earth to shreds in his face!
The crash was part of Nathan’s nightmare,—part of it until he felt himself rocking, bumping, knocking, billowing, hurled at a strange tangent he could not comprehend.
Then came another crash, more horrible than before. He was falling,—down, down, down. BUMP!
Roach uttered one long-drawn, grisly cry. A car beam had crushed his legs. When some ominous ripping sound followed, a portion of the iron underwork broke throughthe timbers where he lay impaled, crushing his skull in the inky dark.
For an instant all was quiet,—the ghastly quiet before pandemonium. Then from up front started a gigantic hissing of steam. The engine boiler blew an instant later. When the roar had echoed away across the distance, hoarse voices were calling, a staccato tatting began,—a machine-gun spitting death.
Nathan came to his senses and tore frantically at nail-jagged sheathing that pinned his lower limbs. His hat was lost. One of his legs was shot with sudden agony where a nail had spiked it to the bone.
But he crawled out. Somehow he crawled out. The leg was not broken. He looked around.
Through black fog loomed a horrible glare. Sharp tongues of ruddy, ominous flame shot up, forked, ravenous. The glare grew brighter. It disclosed grotesque, hysterical figures silhouetted against roaring yellow. In the wrecked cars, imprisoned men were bellowing in agony. From surrounding banks of murky dark, fiends were shooting down others as they crawled from wreckage or forced twisted doors open and leaped down the embankment.
The wreckage fired terribly. It might have been sprayed with oil, so swiftly did those tongues of liquid flame leap from timber to timber. And through the hissing, crackling, snapping, roaring tumult which obliterated the next few minutes came sharp rifle fire and singing death.
It was massacre!
Nathan could not grasp where he was, where to flee, what to do. Fear-grazed, he stood irresolute. The fire-painted fog blanketed everything.
Then from the mist-wall a short distance away he heard more frenzied shrieking than the rest.
“Americanski! Americanski!” The attackers had recognized his uniform.
Nat tried to run forward. He slipped and fell. The entire Bolshevik army piled immediately on his back.
Nathan waited for the impact of bullet or bayonet stab to finish him. His terror was so great he was physically paralyzed. The fortunes of war! The end had come! He was interested to see what Death would be like. Let it come—quickly.
But the entire Bolshevik army lifted itself from his back. He was yanked to his feet. In front of him, lighted by the wild, barbaric flames was a huge, bearded man in a high, outlandish, lambskin hat pushed over one ear. He jabbered at Nathan crazily.
“N’panam’ayu!” (I don’t understand!) cried Nathan frantically.
But his contention had small effect on the Russian. Nathan protested hysterically that he did not understand.
The big Bolshevik grew angrier and angrier. Then a tall, lithe figure, girt with a huge cavalry sword, jammed his way forward. He looked like a Cossack, though the Cossacks were considered pro-Ally.
This man took note of Nathan’s uniform. To the boy’s stunned astonishment he spoke in broken Germanic English.
“You are American?”
“Yes,” cried Nathan. He could scarcely make himself heard amid the increasing tumult all around.
“You are American soldat—yist?”
“I’m a Y. M. C. A. man!”
“Where are you going? You help Czecho-slovak—yist?”
“I was only traveling on the train—Petrograd to America!”
The panther-like young fellow jabbered to the man in the lambskin hat. A dozen others tried to harangue each other at once. Nathan looked death in the face. A dozen bayonets were ready to finish him without further ado, for Nathan heard that sickening word “shteek!” Finally the Cossack prevailed.
“You go with us. Do not run away. We ask you question afterward!”
A dozen maniacal hands gripped him. Down the incline on the south side of the horrible furnace he was hustled, out of range of the bullets.
The bullet fire was subsiding, however. The flames were roaring in triumph over the long line of splintered cars where a few luckless human beings were roasting horribly.
Nathan was half-dragged, half-carried to the bottom of an embankment. There were hordes of stampeding horses there. One had a bullet through its nose and was shrieking in agony. There is no earthly cry like the shriek of awounded horse. It was dispatched with a shot in the head and broke a man’s leg in its writhing.
The attacking crowd which had engineered this holocaust was a tattered, unruly, blood-crazed mob.
“You climb up!” ordered the tall Cossack grimly. He indicated a scrubby pony that three men were holding by the head.
Nathan had no choice. He was living by minutes now. The Cossack threw his pipe-stem leg over another pony. His act was followed by a dozen. There was a howling argument over something. Then southward from the roaring, roasting horror, serpentine along the trackage, a cavalcade started abruptly down into deeper southern fog. Nathan had to grip the high Siberian saddle tightly to preserve his balance. It was like riding atop a moving fence post. The Cossack had the reins of the pony’s bridle.
Nathan was conscious of traveling down a far, far slope. He marveled how the men knew their way in that fog. The slope seemed miles long before they reached the valley bottom. Then he realized the cavalcade was taking its course from the depression in the hills. But the horses walked. The hysteria of the crime which had been consummated burned itself out.
Several horsemen trotted alongside and howled questions at Nat in their native tongue. Over and over the young man had to protest he did not understand. Finally when they stopped once in that labyrinth of mist, Nathan demanded of the Cossack:
“Where are you taking me?”
“Beeg commandant! You see! Stop talk!”
“What for?”
“You have come from Petrograd! To answer question! I say stop talk!”
“And what then?”
“Ah! We see how good you answer question!”
Due southward they bore—if Nathan kept sense of direction. It was uncanny how these horses found their footing in that fog. The ride became a nightmare in whichhuge bearded demons rode with him. Hour after hour it seemed to continue. Then far ahead, lights gleamed fantastic through the mist. They were approaching a settlement, back from the railroad.
Nathan had been in scores of such lost Siberian villages. One long, wide, muddy street of log huts with acres of sapling-fenced cattle pens behind: they were all alike. Two big beacons were afire before the largest house in the place, half-way up a slight incline on the right.
“You come!” ordered the Cossack.
Nathan almost fell to the ground when first his weight bore upon his stiffened leg. He groaned with the pain. But he was immediately grabbed and jostled forward. In behind the twisted fence he was hurried, while aroused villagers, a tatterdemalion crew, gathered from fifty directions.
The room into which he was pushed was low-studded and rough-hewn. Candle-lighted, its corners and furnishings were mostly in shadow. At a rough plank table in the center sat a bear of a man in a great ulster with a fur hat like a drum major’s. He had immense black whiskers—in which he might easily have lost articles of small compass such as stub pencils, cigar holders, toothpicks, pipe-stems, and never found them again—and those whiskers were finished off at the top with the longest, wildest, most wonderful pair of mustaches that Nathan dreamed could ever adhere to a male countenance and allow that male to preserve any semblance of Dignity. But there was not an inkling of doubt about the Dignity of this bear-like Commandant. It was immense, and the whiskers and mustaches did it. He took great pride in his whiskers and mustaches. Undoubtedly they had been responsible for his elevation to Commandant. A man with such stupendous hirsute adornments could be nothing less. And in further proof that he was a truly great man, across and about both breasts was a display of moth-eaten medals and badges that made his chest resemble the souvenir board of a street fakir at an Elks Field Day or Fireman’s Muster, back in Vermont.
A half-dozen of the bear’s “staff” were gathered in distressing Dignity also about the table as Nat was brought forward. They too were high-hatted and bewhiskered, though not so terrifically as the Commandant. There wasbut one set of such whiskers on earth, and they were upon the Commandant’s countenance. One man had a big, greasy book open before him. He appeared to be “clerk” of this Inquisition. When he wrote in the book, he put his tongue in his cheek and lowered his accipitral nose within four inches of his writing. He had hands like boxing gloves. The panther-like Cossack continued to act as interpreter.
“Now—you tell Commandant where you go,” he ordered.
“Moscow to Harbin, then to America,” declared Nathan hoarsely. The stolid ring of Tartar faces drew close to the candle-light.
“You been with Czecho-slovak—yist?”
“I passed through their lines,” assented the Yankee.
“Where you pass through lines?”
“Ybargenosk!”
“What for you go to America?”
“To tell my people the truth about the Bolsheviki,” Nathan answered. Not to humor these men meant swift and unspeakable death. “The Americanski know only lies about the Bolsheviki,” he stumbled onward, hoping against hope to make friends. “I go to America to stop the lies. It will help your cause much.”
All present seemed to be impressed when this was interpreted. A general discussion ensued, principally with hands.
“We wish to know how much Czecho-slovak at Ybargenosk,” the Cossack declared, interpreting the Commandant’s next question.
There were three hundred, a pitiful little garrison, at Ybargenosk.
“Three thousand!” said Nathan promptly.
At once any good will which he might have manufactured by his references to America and his mission was lost in the disfavor which this announcement received. Imprecations and abuses were hurled at him as though he personally were responsible.
“How far Czech’s line go?” was the next query.
“As far as Chita,” Nathan responded. “From there to Harbin the Japanese are in control.”
They questioned Nat about Czech equipment, about Czech plans, about Czech supplies, about the recent passage ofgoods trains, about conditions in Moscow, about a rumor which had spread over mid-Siberia that a medical train was headed westward loaded with Red Cross supplies. Nathan answered as best he could. But he was distrusted. Sentiment curdled against him.
One man wished to know if the skies were blue in America, the same as they were in Russia. Another declared that he had heard that all horses and cows in America had two legs, and how did a horse or cow move about if it only had two legs?
And such human material was striving to found a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal!
Rapidly Nathan lost caste. They took away his khaki coat and the contents of his pockets. There was much reference to the notes that the man with the big hands had recorded in the greasy book. Then from the mêlée of confusion and discussion, Nat’s blood began to curdle as he heard the general word “shteek” on all sides. (“Bayonet him!”)
The tall Cossack seemed to be defending Nat. The Cossack had to give it up. He shrugged his narrow shoulders and stalked out, his big saber rattling noisily.
With a blunt wave of his huge arm, the Commandant arose from the table. He gave an order in Russian and two men stepped forward. After a fashion they saluted. They were sandy-complexioned and had no chins. Another order, with a jerk of a big thumb toward the ashen-faced Yankee. They saluted again.
Nathan was seized and bundled from the room. The crowd trailed after. The flaming knots burned higher outside the door, death pylons now.
Into the yard Nat was dragged and the crowd fell back. They formed a semicircle for the execution. One of the soldiers drew his long glistening bayonet from a loop at his left hip. He clicked it upon the end of his rifle. Then he jumped the gun up into his hands and steeled himself for the messy thing he had been ordered to do.
But Nathan Forge of Paris, Vermont, U.S.A. had no intention of standing there and being stuck like an animal in an abattoir. His body stiffened. Horror maddened him. The only weapons, the only friends, he had left in theworld were the two gnarled fists that Bernie Gridley had cauterized.
Nathan’s gorge rose. He leaped like a cat. His right fist smashed straight at the head soldier’s lack of chin. The blow broke his jaw. The gun dropped from his hands, fell sideways, and the bayonet stuck a bystander in the throat. Nathan’s boot then came up and stove into the pit of the other man’s abdomen. The man doubled like a jack-knife.
At this sudden display of agility and damage, the flabbergasted spectators shrank back. Nathan crashed another blow at the gaping features of a lean fellow who barred his way to the fence. Over the fence went the Yankee and into the murk.
And bedlam broke loose behind him! Hoarse bellows roared in the fog. Shots snapped. A group of horses by the gate began stampeding. The log house spilled soldiers and officers, and the yard bumbled like a nest of yellow-jackets.
Nathan tripped on the other side the fence and went down on his face. He cut a gash across his forehead that for the moment blinded him. But he ran—ran somehow—ran wildly.
He was suddenly thankful for the fog. It enveloped him. It shut off pursuit.
Down the hill he fled, guiding himself by weak, nebulous window lights from huts on either hand. He knew a mob was trailing after. Horses were coming. Two shots cracked in quick succession. The boy felt a deadly, cruel kick in his left arm. In an instant the arm went numb. Something warm and sticky dripped from his fingers. He had been shot. The arm was bleeding.
Into a passageway between two houses he dodged, on into cattle runs behind. Again he was living by moments. He smashed head-on into a diminutive cow. Which was the most terrified will never be known. But he did not lose his sense of direction. Down the hill the road by which they had entered the settlement turned at right angles northward, out toward that great defile in the hills. His pursuers had lost him in the fog. He skirted through back yards, climbed endless fences, bumped into all sorts of palings and impedimenta. But he reached the bottom of that incline.
There were hoarse shoutings all about him. Several more shots were fired wildly. A group of breathless, running men passed within three feet of where he crouched in the shadow of a gate.
The place swarmed with frustrated Bolsheviks who had been cheated of their quarry, outwitted by a Yankee! Nathan left it swarming. He got onto the steppe’s road and headed off northward into soggy, inky night. And fog! That fog!
The boy had a blind instinct to strike back toward the railroad. The railroad meant a frail chance for stopping a troop train and rejoining his fellows. Yet hunting the railroad in that fog was like groping for a lost love in Abaddon.
He walked into a post and had the breath knocked from him, learning that he had not yet reached the edge of the village. He stumbled over old boards, half-buried in muck. After that he groped his way more carefully with his one good arm.
The pursuers gave up the hunt early. It was nonsense, hunting a fugitive in such a fog. Sounds of the village grew fainter behind the groping, stumbling, tight-lipped Yankee. A vastness as of infinity between the planets enveloped him. There were no stars or lights. He wore neither hat nor coat—only his khaki shirt—and the fog penetrated to his marrow.
He had found the road out of town, and he tried to keep the road out of town. The only way he knew that he was keeping the road out of town was by the muck in which he staggered and sloughed his way. The moment he found himself walking on hard, frost-nipped grass, he returned to the slough.
Foot by foot, yard by yard, rod by rod, he went out and on, into absolute blackness, not daring to stop an instant, fearing the morning might find the fog lifted and disclose him. That would mean recapture and a consummation of the fate he had dodged that night.
His face became splashed with blood and muck. He could not tie a bandage about his head, first because he had no bandage, second because his left arm was useless and negligible for the tying of anything. He did not have a left arm. Only a stiff Something hitched to his leftshoulder. Not that his arm had been shot away. The chance bullet had struck a nerve and effected temporary paralysis.
On! On! On!
Ankles were wrenched and twisted. Again and again he fell forward. He only saved his face by plunging his good arm, elbow deep, in bog. At times he had to stop, go back and picked up his route again.
That fog! It was thick like cheese, black like paint. It shut out noises. The slough! slough! slough! of his boots were the only sounds he heard. He might have been groping across a world-wide pit of the damned. Yet he had to go on. He must go on. He prayed for the morning and yet he feared what the morning might disclose.
He lost track of time. He could not recollect how long he and Roach had slept before that murderous crash. Roach! Poor Roach! Then it must have taken the cavalcade an hour to ride down that long defile in the hills; how many hours after that to reach the village, he had no memory or conception. He had been before the Commandant another half-hour. After a time he was obsessed with the notion that he had been going on, hours upon hours, himself. Morning must come soon. Or wasn’t it yet midnight?
Leg movement began to grow mechanical. He counted his progress by steps,—one, two, three, four, five, six! One, two, three, four, five, six! He felt of his left hand and discovered the blood had caked hard. Then the bleeding must have stopped. It was queer. But thank God for it, nevertheless.
On! On! On!One, two, three, four, five, six! One, two, three, four, five six!Lost in Siberia! Lost in Siberia!One, two, three, four, five, six!—One—two—three—four—five—six!
He grew feverish. It was almost more than human flesh and blood could endure. His injured leg was afire. Every bend of his knee sent whips of flame up and down its cords, from ankle to thigh, from thigh to ankle. One, two, three, four, five, six! Slough, slough, slough! He grew hysterical; he began talking aloud. Oh, God, keep him from weakening! Give him the strength to go on!
God!
Into his mind came another time of desperate predicamentback over the years,—a night when two terrified little boys squatted in wet alders and prayed the Almighty to save them from the terrible retribution of kissing a little girl.
God!
Nathan went down on his knees. It was not because he intended to kneel in prayer. It was because he stumbled and could not rise again.
“Dear God,” he cried hoarsely, wildly. “Dear God——”
In the awful void, no seeming contact with anything mundane but the feel of mud and steppe grass beneath his boots, he felt suddenly so light-headed that he wondered what was happening to him. Was he dying?
“Dear God—Dear God——”
He fainted. Or rather, he collapsed.
There is always a morning.
Strange, unreal gray permeated the void. Rolling on billows of nausea, Nathan recovered groggy senses. He was freezing cold; he was being consumed by fire. Where was he? His mouth was dried leather. Where was he? He had no eyes; they had been burned out, or they were in the process of burning out right now. Where was he?
He moved and it agonized him. He uttered a piteous cry for no one to hear. He fell back. He moved again. He got up on an elbow,—the length of an arm. He fell back again.Where was he?
It came to him where he was. He was lost in Siberia. He must go on.
There are depths of endurance in the human spirit which no man can assay until he has a last great need for taking their fathoms.
Nathan got up—reeling. He did go on.
The quickened circulation of his blood caused by the exertion warmed his stiffened limbs somewhat. Joints bent more easily with use.
The events of the past night finally came to him in full terror. He remembered he might yet be only a mile orso from the tatterdemalion crew in that horror-village. He drove himself forward faster.
He drank mud water, foul with grit, to assuage a burning thirst.
The world was gray now. There was no longer need for groping. But it was a ghastly, grisly grayness. At any moment phantoms might loom in the mist. There was light enough to examine his arm. Mercifully he could not see how bad a wound the bullet had made, what had happened. It was too near his shoulder in the back.
“I’ve got to go on! I will go on!” he cried indomitably.
The fog showed no prospect of lifting. It was still a world without form and void. Dimly conscious in his direction, treading now on the firmer ground that bordered the steppe’s road, Nathan went on and away into nothing, nothing! Only fog!
Once he heard a horse approaching, slopping through the quag. Frenziedly he left the road, drew into the deeper mist, flattened himself to earth. Horse and rider passed him about a hundred feet to the east, a high-hatted rider on a dirty, creamy pony. Then quiet again—ethereal quiet—the journey—on and on—and on!
The fog of the world and of life was having a last great rubble with Nathan.
There could never be another fog like the fog of that night. There could never be another grayness quite like that last awful morning.
A couple of hours after dawn Nathan began drawing on raw nerve to make that journey. He had no prospect of finding food. He had no prospect of finding any one, even if he made the railroad. Trains over the railroad ran days apart now. He was far closer to death than he suspected.
But the blind instinct to live, to win an objective, drove him onward. And the road and the hills kept his footsteps true. Hour after hour, mile after mile,—still he staggered onward. Little six-inch steps at times now. Fog! Fog! Fog!
Had the sun risen? Could the sun be shining above?
The fog was luminous—different somehow. It seemed so.
“It’s got to lift sometime!” he cried brokenly. “The sun’s shining somewhere. The sun is always shining somewhere. I must find it. I must!”
How long he had been traveling since he awakened on damp ground and fought himself to his feet, he had no way of telling. Whether the sun had risen and was shining brightly above, he did not know. How close or how far he was to the railroad was equally vague. But Nathan, following that straight, muddy, northern road, came at last to a turn. The road bore off at right angles to the eastward.
He stopped, swaying dizzily.
“I didn’t come to any such corner last night,” he cried. “I know I didn’t! If I’m down in a valley—in a defile—somewhere around here are hills. I’m going straight northward and see if I can’t find hills. Then I’ll climb somehow to the top and try and get my direction—see if I can locate the railroad.”
It was not a decision to be taken lightly. So long as he kept to the road, that road must lead somewhere. If he lost that road by wandering away into the hills, he might never be able to find it again. Yet could he always follow it through lowlands, always stumble and stagger onward down in fog? He had to make that decision. And he did make that decision. He decided to climb upward on to the heights and trust to the sunlight above to set him aright.
The sunlight above to set him aright!
Anyhow, that climb started. For he found a hill almost directly ahead of that abrupt turn in the road to the eastward. That is why it had turned,—to avoid the grade.
It might not have been a serious climb for a normal man. But for a man exhausted and broken as Nathan was exhausted and broken, it was Golgotha in earnest. This was its only redeeming feature: as he dragged himself up, it became quickly evident that the world was growing brighter about him.
Yes, somewhere above the sun was shining, shining gloriously!
Up, up, up! On hands and knees now. The fog was thinning. He knew, because somehow the air felt warmer in those moments when his body was cold.
Because he was turned face downward, crawling tortuously, he did not see that sun when first it was discernible through the vapor.
He had to stop many times. When he started again hewondered in the back of his splitting head and grinding consciousness where he was finding the energy to make that ascent. At times he was so ill with vertigo that his stomach was racked; perhaps it was only the intuitive fear of falling and rolling back that long and sharp slope to the bottom—into the fog again!—that kept him conscious.
He was clawing upward a few feet now, then stopping half-hours, it seemed, for rest. His tongue was swollen. He could not shut his eyes for the agony. He tried to swallow and his throat refused to function. It came to him that in those self-commands to go on, the voice was not his own. It was no voice at all. He was making crazy, growling, guttural sounds.
And then—the sun!
Raising his eyes after one of his pauses for rest, hanging weirdly above him he beheld a ball of pale lemon, lambent in the heavens. Was it the sun? Could it be the sun?
Of course it was the sun! Nathan laughed at himself for the question. He did not realize his laugh was a crazy cackle.
Nathan climbed out of the fog.
He emerged from the fog-belt in the space of a hundred feet, left it below him entirely.
It was not quite the top. Not yet!
But when he had climbed out of that fog-belt into the warm, enervating sunshine, he saw the top.
Yes, he saw it, and he saw something else. The wounded, groping, clawing, climbing man raised tortured body from above the last mist-wreath, a hundred feet below the very summit of the grade. But as he raised blistered eyes toward that top—what was it?—an illusion? It must be! No! It was not an illusion!
There on the peak, swathed in the Sunlight Glorious, Nathan saw—a woman!
Queenly and tall, she was, Diana of the Morning! Calm eyes were gazing afar across limitless billows of night mist. Sunlight glinted on breeze-blown tresses. About her arrow-straight figure floated in beautiful folds a cape of blue with a scarlet lining. She was a white woman, andblue and scarlet cape was the field uniform of the American Red Cross, theGreatest Mother in the World!
Nathan was hideous with grime and filth. Blood was caked upon him. One arm hung useless. He had to pull himself that last hundred feet by inches. But when he knew it was not an illusion, not a mirage of glazed eyeballs and mangled imagination, he uttered a cry, a piteous cry, and held out his one good hand.
He held out his one good hand to Woman Beautiful on the Hill Top—Woman Beautiful at the Summit—who seemed waiting there for him to come up, though the last hundred feet he came sightless and staggering.
That was the one big time when Nathan held out his hand in agony of body and spirit to Womanhood and Womanhood responded as a ministering angel.
Woman Beautiful started at the cry, turned her gaze down, beheld him. Then——
Swiftly she started down the grade—to greet him—to reach him—to give him the final help he needed to realize attainment—to reach the pinnacle whereon is Victory.
Woman Beautiful came down. In her eyes was all Tenderness. On her face was Sympathy Infinite. She uttered a little cry of compassion. She caught his hand.
“You poor, poor fellow!” were the words that Nathan heard. “You’re hurt! Let me help you!”
Regardless of his broken body, no woman had ever spoken to Nathan in that tone before. Tears flooded across his glazed eyes then. Moisture welled in his throat. He wanted to speak, to answer. He could not.
Let her help him! No woman had ever said that to him, either.
“Lean on me!” came the invitation from her wealth of compassion and tenderness. “You’ve only a little way more to go. Make a little more effort. Then you can rest—up in the Sunlight!”
He could rest—up in the Sunlight!
The third miracle happened then. The broken man felt his arm being lifted across a woman’s shoulders. And suddenly by his side the resilient, supple strength of a woman sustained him. He felt a woman’s effort added to his own. He felt her almost lift him. He never knew that a womancould possess such strength. She spoke with compassion, she asked to help him, she placed his arm across her shoulder, she sustained him, she added her effort to his own, she lifted him, she gave him her strength—all she had to give, all that he needed; she literally bore him upward to the summit. He reached the Hill Top.
It was all Sunlight.
A thousand feet away was the railroad. A long train of a dozen white cars stood there, great carmine crosses emblazoned upon their sides, the glory insignia of the great Red Cross. The engine had been detached. Train crew and guard of soldiers were using that locomotive to shunt off piles of charred and smoldering wreckage—to clear the track—that the Red Cross on its mission of mercy might “carry on.”
Into the last car broke the woman in blue and scarlet. She interrupted the doctor in charge.
“Come quickly!” she cried. “A wounded soldier! I went off to that point of land to the south while they were clearing the track. As I stood here, a horribly hurt man crawled up the slope out of the valley fog. He’s stretched out on the ground in collapse. Come quickly!”
A stream of white-clad figures poured from the coaches, across the level plateau to the edge of the ravine. Two young surgeons bore a stretcher.
They picked up Nathan and laid him upon it. It was the work of a few moments to bear him back to the train.
“An American soldier! One of our boys!” cried Doctor Cleeve. “They probably attacked the train last night and captured him and he escaped from them!”
It was mid-afternoon when the Red Cross train was able to proceed again, into the deeper heart of Siberia, bearing Nathan backward. But he was among his friends—his countrymen—people of his blood and homeland.
He awoke in a white-iron berth, gauze bandages about his head, his left arm in a sling, bound tightly against his body. It was night. The great mercy-train was clicking steadily westward.
“Where is she?” he cried wildly, as he raised himself on his good elbow and addressed the young doctor, nodding by the window.
“Where is who?”
“The woman—who came down the hill—the one who helped me to the top!”
“She’s asleep! It’s the middle of the night. You’ve been unconscious and in delirium. Feeling better?”
“Who is she? Where have I seen her before? Or was she just an angel! And her face from my own imagination?”
“Miss Theddon found you, old man. She’s a new nurse, just out from the States. Joined us from Manila. You’re a lucky guy!”
“Theddon? Theddon? What’s her first name?”
“Madelaine, I think. Madelaine Theddon.”
“What part of the States does she come from?”
“Somewhere up in Massachusetts. I think I heard her talking with Doctor Cleeve about Springfield.”
“It wasn’t illusion!” cried Nathan then. “It was my girl of the Star!—My girl of the Window—out here—away out here—in Siberia! Oh, my God!”
“You know her, old man?”
“I saw her face once in a star,” affirmed Nathan. “I——”
Another doctor heard Nathan’s wild declamation and entered hastily.
“Delirium!” announced the first. “He thinks he knows Miss Theddon. Better give him another shot, Jack. He’s pretty near done for!”
But it was not delirium. How could they understand?