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Page 70
A nurse admitted Carley into a small bare anteroom. Carley made known her
errand.
"I'm glad it's Rust you want to see," replied the nurse. "Some of these
boys are going to die. And some will be worse off if they live. But Rust
may get well if he'll only behave. You are a relative--or friend?"
"I don't know him," answered Carley. "But I have a friend who was with him
in France."
The nurse led Carley into a long narrow room with a line of single beds
down each side, a stove at each end, and a few chairs. Each bed appeared to
have an occupant and those nearest Carley lay singularly quiet. At the far
end of the room were soldiers on crutches, wearing bandages on their beads,
carrying their arms in slings. Their merry voices contrasted discordantly
with their sad appearance.
Presently Carley stood beside a bed and looked down upon a gaunt, haggard
young man who lay propped up on pillows.
"Rust--a lady to see you," announced the nurse.
Carley had difficulty in introducing herself. Had Glenn ever looked like
this? What a face! It's healed scar only emphasized the pallor and furrows
of pain that assuredly came from present wounds. He had unnaturally bright
dark eyes, and a flush of fever in his hollow cheeks.
"How do!" he said, with a wan smile. "Who're you?"
"I'm Glenn Kilbourne's fiancee," she replied, holding out her hand.
"Say, I ought to've known you," he said, eagerly, and a warmth of light
changed the gray shade of his face. "You're the girl Carley! You're almost
like my--my own girl. By golly! You're some looker! It was good of you to
come. Tell me about Glenn."
Carley took the chair brought by the nurse, and pulling it close to the
bed, she smiled down upon him and said: "I'll be glad to tell you all I
know--presently. But first you tell me about yourself. Are you in pain?
What is your trouble? You must let me do everything I can for you, and
these other men."
Carley spent a poignant and depth-stirring hour at the bedside of Glenn's
comrade. At last she learned from loyal lips the nature of Glenn
Kilbourne's service to his country. How Carley clasped to her sore heart
the praise of the man she loved--the simple proofs of his noble disregard
of self! Rust said little about his own service to country or to comrade.
But Carley saw enough in his face. He had been like Glenn. By these two
Carley grasped the compelling truth of the spirit and sacrifice of the
legion of boys who had upheld American traditions. Their children and
their children's children, as the years rolled by into the future, would
hold their heads higher and prouder. Some things could never die in the
hearts and the blood of a race. These boys, and the girls who had the
supreme glory of being loved by them, must be the ones to revive the
Americanism of their forefathers. Nature and God would take care of
the slackers, the cowards who cloaked their shame with bland excuses
of home service, of disability, and of dependence.
Carley saw two forces in life--the destructive and constructive. On the one
side greed, selfishness, materialism: on the other generosity, sacrifice,
and idealism. Which of them builded for the future? She saw men as wolves,
sharks, snakes, vermin, and opposed to them men as lions and eagles. She
saw women who did not inspire men to fare forth to seek, to imagine, to
dream, to hope, to work, to fight. She began to have a glimmering of what a
woman might be.
That night she wrote swiftly and feverishly, page after page, to Glenn,
only to destroy what she had written. She could not keep her heart out of
her words, nor a hint of what was becoming a sleepless and eternal regret.
She wrote until a late hour, and at last composed a letter she knew did not
ring true, so stilted and restrained was it in all passages save those
concerning news of Glenn's comrade and of her own friends. "I'll
never--never write him again," she averred with stiff lips, and next moment
could have laughed in mockery at the bitter truth. If she had ever had any
courage, Glenn's letter had destroyed it. But had it not been a kind of
selfish, false courage, roused to hide her hurt, to save her own future?
Courage should have a thought of others. Yet shamed one moment at the
consciousness she would write Glenn again and again, and exultant the next
with the clamouring love, she seemed to have climbed beyond the self that
had striven to forget. She would remember and think though she died of
longing.
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