Part 17
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. Wardwell remembered 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 was stunned 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 wish to 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 into his 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 part of him, which did not and would not die.
From that night he had known that he would not die so long as Augusta lived.
But his thought sometimes went further than this. At the oddest moments, often when hands and body and brain were busiest with the surface of things, more than once when he was actually fighting for his life, there had come to him a flash of something--he did not know whether it was of foreknowledge or of crazy presumption. But it came to him.
Might it not be that Augusta and he were actually coming to the adventure of death together--to _survive_ it!--to hold to each other _beyond_ it!
If he had believed that the thought was his own, he would have given it no heed. But he was sure that it was not his own. Augusta had given it to him. Of that much he was sure. And in that much he did not reject it.
For himself, out of his own experiences, he had seen the chemistry of death setting to work upon the cooling bodies of men in so many ways, in such varied circumstances, and yet always with such unfailing method and matter-of-factness, that he had never seen any reason to believe in the survival of anything beyond it.
Nevertheless, Augusta had given him the thought.
In the days which he had spent in New York he had looked every moment for Augusta. But when he had stood one day upon the Avenue and had scanned the marching of five thousand girl nurses who were preparing for their work in the train of war, and had not seen Augusta among them, he was convinced that she was not in the country. He was right, for Augusta was already in France.
Since he had come back now to what he felt was the business of concluding the war, he was sure that Augusta was nearer to him than she had been since that day when she left him in the hills. Day and night, whether in fighting or in dead sleep, he could feel her presence with him.
Sometimes she was as poignantly real to him, and as reassuring, as on the long-ago nights in the wagon and in the sugar hut when he used to wake up and listen for her breathing. But there was no illusion in this feeling of her nearness. He knew that Augusta was not really there with him. She was, he had no doubt, though he had not so much as heard her name mentioned, behind these lines somewhere doing the work that came to her. Yet there were times when his head would go up, one ear cocked up in the old way, and a quick little grin would run across his face, as though he had just thought of something to tell her that would make her laugh.
In the last three weeks Jimmy's feeling that Augusta was living in his life, in every moment of the day's work, had been growing so strong that he knew it could not go on. The end must be near. He would soon see Augusta. He began to look for it hourly.
It was peculiar that he now no longer thought of the original cause of his losing Augusta. War and life had ground all that away. He knew that he would find Augusta looking only to the future. They would keep only the memory of those months of dear love that they had lived together. Their work which they had loved with their souls, the dreams which they had had together, even these things were of the past, and done with.
Wardwell knew that, left to himself, his mind would have thought only of going back--when this was over--and, with Augusta, trying to rebuild and live in the home of dreams that had been their house of love in the Hills of Desire. But Augusta never went back. She was too vital. She was too much like life itself.
If he was to have Augusta, to be with her, he must go on.
He was coming swift to the Great Adventure. He could feel the pulse of his being rising to it.
He did not fear, for he believed that now Augusta wanted him. And if her eyes saw a light through the dropping darkness, then it was a true light. He had only to stumble after.
So he smiled contentedly at the young officer's hesitation in speaking to him of danger, and at the foolish theories of the men regarding his life.
Augusta had always had her will.
Then he happened to remember--for the first time in many months--that book which had once seemed more to him than life or death. In New York the publishers had told him that it had done well, considering war times and all other things it had done very well. The royalties, they said, they were still holding, because up to that time they had not been able to locate Augusta, to whom he had assigned the ownership of the book three years ago. He had merely told them to keep on looking for her.
Still smiling, he wished that he and Augusta might have just one good picnic on those spoiling royalties.
From behind the little mound of dirt on the hillside the machine gun was dripping a line of bullets along the wall where the Americans had been. There was nobody there, but the German gunner was not yet convinced of that. A gentle, steady breeze was coming down from the slope, clearing the light smoke from the machine gun nests and rolling it slowly down toward the dry creek bed and the bridge. Wardwell thus had a perfect view of the ravine.
But the enemy was cautious. Not a head nor even a hand showed above the line of dirt along the face of the hill. Wardwell searched the ravine itself. A bush in the midst of the dark green centre of the ravine seemed to be moving about grotesquely. Wardwell, over his sights, watched it sharply, until his eyes and his imagination working together resolved it into its component parts. It was a man with green branches tied all about him, and he was tugging a heavy machine gun into a new position.
The effect of his shot gave Wardwell a thorough surprise. Not only did the man with the branches tied about him disappear, but what had seemed to be an almost solid hedge of green shrubs across the mouth of the ravine fell away instantly, revealing some bare rocks and two guns. Wardwell mentally rubbed his eyes and stared. There must, before, have been at least three or four men standing about the guns and all draped in heavy bushes.
As he watched, one of the guns began to fire again, though he could not see the hands that managed it, and a sudden flutter of twigs and leaves came pattering down upon his head. They had guessed him out in his tree.
He shifted his position to get the full protection of the body of the tree, and gave his attention to the lone gun out on the hill. He would like to put that gun out of working, not because it was doing any harm just now, but because of what might have to be done later. He watched patiently for several minutes, while the gun in the ravine continued to trim the little branches from his tree, but it did not seem that he would get a chance. The fellow in the ditch was keeping entirely under cover and working his gun with a stubborn fixity of idea against the line of the bridge wall.
The sputtering explosion of a soft shell on the bridge startled Wardwell. Now if the Germans had found the creek bed with gas--and, of course, they had every range studied down to a matter of feet--then there was a bad time ahead. He waited while another shell fell into the creek bed below the bridge and another dropped down in front of him right near where the two wounded men had been placed. The foul poison was practically colorless, but, immediately, he could see the little green tufts of grass in the creek bed withering to death.
He slid to the ground and made a low running dive down the bank of the creek. The lieutenant was already giving orders to get the two men up from the bed of the creek and to make holes for them in the top of the bank on the north side. Wardwell saw that the lieutenant had taken his decision. They could not stay here. The creek bed would soon fill with gas. If they were to go back, they must go at once, across the half mile of open field between them and the river. They must carry at least one wounded man, and, from the elevation, those machine guns could follow them every inch of the way. What was worse, the gas would soon fill the creek bed and then the wind coming down from the hill would carry it back so that it would follow them to the river.
Well, they were not going back. Or at least, Wardwell judged from the lieutenant's dispositions, they were not going back until they had made a try for those machine guns.
Three minutes later they were all strung out just on the edge of the upper bank, with intervals of about fifty feet between them, their bodies curled up tight for a spring, their eyes fixed on the spitting guns up the hill before them. The two hundred and fifty yards of sloping hillside looked as smooth and bare as the top of a slightly tilted table. There did not seem to be a hollow anywhere in it, not as much as the suggestion of a furrow, into which a man might drop for breath and an instant's respite in his rush up toward those guns.
They were stripped of everything except their rifles and the one or two bombs that each man could carry in his rush. They had not needed details of instruction. They had done this thing before.
A man rose silently from the edge of the bank. It was the young lieutenant himself. He did not stand poised, or look at his men. He came up running, and shot forward with that peculiar, side-wheeling motion that many men acquire from running with a foot ball under one arm while warding off tacklers with the other arm stiff. He ran with his pistol clutched stiffly in his right hand, his other arm curled in against his side. Fifty, sixty, seventy feet he drove on, running low and pigeon-toed, always with that wheeling motion, while the machine guns dropped their other marks and turned their blazing eyes on him.
Before the lieutenant had dropped safe into a little depression of the slope, another man was shooting forward away out on the right. Then another, below the bridge, scooted ahead, dodging along in a way that was his own. Man after man rose running, dove forward for about the length of five seconds--a hundred feet maybe--then dropped flat into anything that looked like a slight protection.
There were no signals, no commands, no noise. It was a game which each man played in his own way. A simple game with only two rules: First, they must not bunch together; second, no man should be last--there must not be any last man.
Saving these two rules, they went forward, each in his own way, each playing out his own hand with death.
Some ran straight, their heads down, their eyes half shut, thinking only of speed. Others ran zig-zagging and dodging as though they were picking their way, although there was no cover at all and no choice of a way.
To the watching foe, who did not even now dare to raise his head above the ground line, there seemed to be not more than three or four men coming up the slope. Of course it was puzzling that those three or four should be able to be continuously popping up at so many different places of a long line. There must be more than that number of men. But there was no way of telling how many. And that, of course, was the reason for the apparently haphazard manner of the rush.
Wardwell, at the extreme right of the uneven line, ran forward with longer sprints than was possible for the men near the middle of the line. In comparison with those others he was reasonably safe out here. His part would come later when, having gotten beyond the line of the machine guns, he must circle down upon them shooting and bombing and yelling while the men in front made the final rush.
He was not often excited now in this business, which had come to be to him merely the day's work. But, running up the hill, he felt a strange and wonderful tingle of excitation of spirit. Something was waiting for him at the end of this run. He was suddenly as sure as he had ever in his life been sure of anything that this was his last fight.
He felt the breath of bullets driving by near his head and dropped, mechanically obedient to his training. But he was up again in a moment and running madly.
Now he was up to the line of the single gun that had been placed out on the hill. But his business was not with that gun. He must run clear over the brow of the hill and get down into the ravine before the boys in front were ready to run straight upon the guns.
He was running wildly now, his body and his spirit strangely lifted with the sense that the Great Adventure was right ahead. It was not the eagerness of battle nor the fever of fighting that ran in his blood. He knew that he was coming to the break in the wall, beyond which lay the Undiscovered Country--so Augusta was whispering to him.
From the edge of the ravine he saw below him ten or a dozen men lying and working at the three machine guns. Out in the open he saw the broken line of his own fellows. There was the young lieutenant lying flat, wriggling along the ground by inches, and digging impatiently with his toe. They were ready.
Across the space, on the other side of the ravine, there came running a youngster whom the boys called "Watertown"--he was forever talking about the place. He came running to the farther edge of the ravine, swinging his bomb.
Wardwell flung his first bomb down into the cluster of guns and men, and leaped sliding, stumbling, falling down the crumbling bank.
Half way down he caught his balance, lay back a little, and steadied himself to throw the other bomb. Then without looking to see the effect he gripped his rifle, and yelling madly leaped down towards the guns.
Five seconds later he was lying quietly against the gravel of the bank. There was a hideous commotion going on about him, but he did not mind it. There was a sharp pain--it felt like a burn--in his throat, and he seemed to have trouble breathing. But it did not seem to matter. He was going to sleep anyway.
And then, presently, he would see Augusta. And then he smiled to himself. Augusta had always had her will.
X
When Wardwell awoke he was petulantly disappointed. He was not quite clear as to what he had expected, but that he should be awakened by the old hated smell of anesthetics was a distinct injury.
He did not feel any immediate physical discomfort, but he knew that this was only because his body had not yet begun to wake up. There were even now vague nerve stirrings in various scattered places through his body, though not connected with each other nor, directly, with him. He knew that these sensations would soon begin to link up with each other, and then they would connect up with him. Presently torture would begin. He knew the whole business. He had watched the process before, and he cringed at its advance.
He felt like a boy who has been cheated of some wonderful promised adventure which he had been just about to begin. He was lonely, and he had been cheated, and if he tried to make the slightest move now somebody would come and begin to poke at him. Why couldn't they leave him alone? He wanted to cry.
And yet there was a sort of elusive contentment about this place--he did not know where or what the place was, and did not care--some kind of a pleasant memory, as though some one had been here. He thought he could dream here--if only they would not come poking at him. Maybe he had been dreaming. He could not remember.