Leerie Part 24

As they waved them off, the muddy column of the first company swung down the street. It was even as they had thought--wounded were with them, and the nurse and surgeon hurried inside to make ready. The day wound itself out in an almost ludicrous repet.i.tion of events. Straggling companies fell back, dropped their wounded, and went on; a few ambulances made the town, gathered up the worst cases, and went back. Desultory sh.e.l.ls picked off their belfry, smashed a group of monuments in the cemetery, and wiped out a street of houses not far away. And every half-hour or so came the orders to evacuate at once. Regiment after regiment fell back through the city; the rest of the division must have pa.s.sed to north and south of it. By nightfall nearly all had pa.s.sed and the town was left like a delta between two dividing currents.

"They'll begin sh.e.l.ling in earnest by midnight. We'll get barrages from both sides. We won't know it, but this town's going to be wiped off the map to-night." The chief said it in his most matter-of-fact voice, but his face showed gray.

The girl hushed him. "The boys might hear, and they've been through so much. There's no harm in letting them hope." She turned back to the emergency kettle she was stirring. They were making cocoa and feeding the boys out of the chalice-cups from the altar. To the nurse it seemed like pa.s.sing the last communion, and though her hands kept steady, her heart seemed drained.

Out of the noise and the gathering gloom outside came two more stretcher-loads. The bearers whistled when they saw the red cross on the door. They whistled harder when they pushed it open and looked inside.

"Gee! we thought all you outfits had been ordered back!" The bearers laid down their burden on a pew, and the fore one groaned out the words.

"We were," the chief spoke. "Sorry we didn't go?"

"Dunno. Bet these chaps wouldn't be, though--if they knew. Don't know whether it's any use trying; they're all but gone, Doc." The speaker jerked his head over his shoulder and thumbed a command to the other bearers. "Here you, Jake! You and Fritzie hustle along with yours."

As the surgeon bent over to examine, the nurse stopped an instant to listen, then went on feeding her boys.

"This one's French." The chief was looking over the first stretcher. "How did you pick him up?"

"Got mixed up with a company of _poilus_ in the last sc.r.a.p. We fought all together."

"Hmmmm! He'll need speed or he'll make it. Give me a hand with him, boys, over to the table there."

"Wait, Doc. There's another just as bad. He's--the other's a Yank."

The spokesman again jerked his comrades into further evidence. One of the bearers was an American, the other a captured German, slightly wounded.

Between them lay a figure in the gray uniform of a correspondent. A heavy growth of beard made the man almost unrecognizable, but something tugged at the chief's memory and set him speculating. He cast a furtive glance over his shoulder toward the nurse, then lowered his voice.

"You haven't any idea who it is, have you?"

"Sure. He's the A. P. man that's been with our division from the first.

His name's Brooks."

The chalice fell through Sheila's fingers and struck the altar steps with a sharp, metallic ring. The next instant she was beside the chief, looking down with wide, unbelieving eyes at the stretcher which held nothing familiar but the gray uniform--and there were many men wearing the same.

It could not be. This was not the way Peter was coming back to her. In all the days of horror, of caring for the hundreds of wounded, it had never entered her mind that war might claim the man she loved. Her love, and the fulfilment thereof, had stood out as the one absolute reality of life, the thing that could not fail. This simply could not be; Peter was still far away, but coming, supreme in his strength, invulnerable in his love and promise to her.

"You--don't know him?" The chief asked it hopefully.

The girl shook her head. "He can't be--The beard--Wait." Her hand slipped through the opening in his uniform to an inside pocket. She drew out a flat bundle of papers, and the first glance told her all she needed to know. There was Peter's unmistakable scribbling on the uppermost, and from under it showed the corner of one of her letters to him.

The chief's hand steadied her. "No time to lose, girl, but we'll pull him through. We've got to fight for it, but we'll do it. Easy there, boys.

Take him over to the table, there, under the light."

But Sheila O'Leary put out a detaining hand. Her eyes were no longer on Peter; she was looking at the figure on the other stretcher. "What did you say about that French boy?"

"He'll have to go, poor chap! There isn't time for both. Listen, Leerie,"

as a flash of pain swept the girl's face, "it's a toss-up between them who's worse, and it's down now to a matter of minutes. It means the best team-work we've done yet to save just your man."

Still the girl made no move. Her eyes were turned away. In her ears was ringing the chorus of the mothers, those waiting for Louis or Jacques or Lucien to come home. Dear G.o.d, what was she to do?

The chief pulled her sleeve. "Wake up, girl. There's a chance for your man, I tell you, only in Heaven's name don't waste it! Come."

She tried to take her eyes away from the boy, tried to shut her ears to the cry that was ringing in them. She wanted to look at Peter and say the word that would start the bearers carrying him to that little zone of light about the altar where they had saved so many during those days. But her eyes clung, in spite of her, to the white boy-face and the faded blue uniform below it. Peter had no mother, no one but herself to face the grief and mourn the loss of him, and the hearts of French mothers had been drained--bled almost to the last drop? Wouldn't Peter say to save that drop? Had she the right to shed it and spare her own heart's bleeding? The questions filtered through her mind with the inevitableness of sands in an hour-gla.s.s. With a cry of agony she wrenched her eyes away at last and faced the chief.

"We'll let Peter--wait. We'll take the boy--first."

Dumfounded, the chief stared for the fraction of a moment; then he shook her. "For G.o.d's sake, wake up, Leerie! You've gone through so much, your thinking isn't just clear. Get rational, girl. You'd be deliberately killing your man, to leave him now. You don't realize his condition, or you wouldn't be wasting time this way. By the time we finish with the first there'll be no chance for the second; they're both bleeding in a dozen places. Here, boys! Help me over with Mr. Brooks."

But Sheila put out a quick hand and held them back. "And if I put Peter first I shall be deliberately killing the other. Don't you see? I can't do it--Peter wouldn't wish it--it would mean--Boys, carry over the other. The chief's going to save a lad for France."

There was no denying her. She stood guard over Peter's stretcher until the other had been lifted and carried away. Grimly the surgeon followed, and Sheila turned to the two who were still holding the stretcher.

"Would you mind putting him down there? Now, will you leave us just a minute?" She spoke to the American, but the German must have understood, for he led the way to the church door and stood with his back to her.

Even the comfort of staying with Peter to the last was denied her. The chief had said it must be team-work, the best. She mustn't waste many seconds. She thought of the many she had helped to die, the courage a warm grip of the hand had given, the healing strength in a smile, and her heart cringed before this last sacrifice of giving Peter over to a desolate, prayerless death. Hardly breathing, she slipped down and laid her cheek to his bearded one. She could offer one prayer, that he need never wake to know. Kneeling there, his last words came back to her almost in mockery:

"Don't bungle your instincts. I'd trust them next to G.o.d's own."

Dear G.o.d, if she only could bungle them! If only they had not wrenched from her this torturing, ghastly choice! She knew the meaning now of the strangeness that had met her as she first crossed the threshold of the little church. She knew why the chorus of mothers had been sung so deep into her heart. The greatest moment of her life had come--a terrible, soul-rending moment. And beyond it lay nothing. She choked out an incoherent, futile prayer into the dulled ears--and left him. This--this was her farewell to Peter Brooks--her man--her man for all time.

The American orderly had disappeared. Sheila stumbled over to the door and gripped the sleeve of the German.

"If he opens his eyes"--she opened and shut her own eyes in pantomime--"come for me, quick. Verstehen?"

The German nodded.

For the next half-hour, with nerves keyed to their utmost and hands working with the greatest speed and skill they were capable of, Sheila O'Leary's soul went down into purgatory and stayed there. Not once did she look beyond the boy she was helping to save; not once did she let herself think what might be happening beyond the circle of light that hemmed them in. With all the woman courage she could muster, she was stifling every breath of love or longing--or self-pity. If she could have killed her body and known that when that night's work was done she would be laid in the cemetery outside with Peter, she would have been almost satisfied.

Suddenly she realized they had finished. The chief was repeating something over and over again.

"The boy is safe. You'd better lie down."

The bearers were moving the boy back to the pews and the chief was leading her down the steps of the chancel. But it was Sheila who guided their steps at the bottom. She led the way toward the German and the thing he had been asked to watch. Terror shook her. It seemed as if she could never look at what she knew would be waiting for her, and yet no power on earth could have held her back.

As she reached the prisoner she saw in bewilderment a strange scattering of things on the floor about him--forceps, some knives, a roll of gauze, and a syringe. There was an odor of a strange antiseptic which made her faint. She tottered and would have fallen had the German not helped the chief to steady her.

"He has not gained consciousness, madam. He has lost too much blood for that." The German spoke in English. He also spread his hands in mute apology for what he had done. "I have stanched his wounds with what poor supplies I had with me. It has merely kept him alive. He will require more care, better dressing."

No one answered. Words seemed the most impossible and absurd means of expression just then.

The German smiled at the look Sheila gave him, and the smile was arrogant.

"You Americans have always made such a fuss over what you have been pleased to call our brutalities. What is war if it isn't a consistent effort to exterminate the enemy? The women are the wives of the enemy and the breeders of more; the wounded are still the enemy--if they recover, they fight again. But a German knows how to honor a brave act. And when you go back, madam, you can tell how Carl Tiefmann, a German surgeon, wounded and taken prisoner, so far forgot his Prussian creed as to spare an enemy for a brave woman."

He bowed and went back to the church doors. Sheila watched him go through a trailing of mist; then she dropped through the chief's arms, unconscious, on the floor beside Peter's stretcher.

The Germans never reached the little town, and by some merciful stroke of luck neither did any more of the sh.e.l.ls. So it came to pa.s.s that on the 11th of November a very white nurse, holding fast to the hand of a man unconscious on a stretcher, followed Peace across the threshold of the American Military Hospital No. 10. It was days before Sheila spoke above a husky whisper or smiled, for it was days before Peter was out of danger, but there came a morning at last when a shaven and shorn Peter, looking oddly familiar, opened clear, sane eyes and saw the woman he loved bending close above him.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "He will require more care, better dressing"]

He gave the same old cry that he had given ages before when he had come out of another nightmare of unconsciousness and fear, "It's Leerie--why, it's Leerie!"