The Book of Susan Part 36

It had proved impossible for me to sail with Phil and Jimmy. Just as the preliminary arrangements were being made, Aunt Belle was stricken down by apoplexy, while walking among the roses of her famous Spanish gardens in Santa Barbara, and so died, characteristically intestate, and, to my astonishment, I found that I had become the sole inheritor of her estate; all of "Hyena Parker's" tainted millions had suddenly poured their burdensome tide of responsibilities--needlessly and unwelcomely--upon me. There was nothing for it. Out to California, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, I must go, and waste precious weeks there with lawyers and house agents and other tiresome human necessities.

The one cheering thought in all this annoying pother was--and it was a thought that grew rapidly in significance to me as I journeyed westward--that fate had now made it possible for me to purify Hyena Parker's millions by putting them to work for mankind.--Well, they have since done their part, to the last dollar; they have spent themselves in the losing battle against Misery, and are no more. Nothing became their lives like the ending of them. But for all that, the world, you see, is as it is--and the battle goes on.

Phil kept in touch with me from the other side, in spite of his difficulties--as did Jimmy and Susan--and he had prepared the way for me when at length I could free myself and sail. I was instructed to go to Paris, direct, and fulfill certain duties there in connection with the ever-increasing burdens and exasperations of the "C. R. B." I did so.

Six months later my activities were transferred to Berne; and--not to trace in detail the evolution of my career, such as it was; for though useful, I hope, it was never, like Phil's, exceptionally brilliant--I had become, about the period of America's entry into the war, a modest captain in the Red Cross, stationed at Evian, in connection with the endless, heartbreaking task of repatriating refugees from the invaded districts. And there my job rooted me until January of that dark winter of our unspeakable depression, 1918.

With the beginning of America's entry into the war Phil had gone to Petrograd for the American Red Cross, his commission being to save the lives of as many Russian babies as possible by the distribution of canned milk. Then, one evening--early in September, 1917, it must have been--he started alone for Moscow, to lay certain wider plans for disinterested relief-work before the sinister, the almost mythical Lenine. That is the last that has ever been seen of him, and no word has ever come forth directly from him out of the chaos men still call Russia. The Red Cross and the American and French Governments have done their utmost to discover his whereabouts, without avail. There are reasons for believing he is not dead, nor even a prisoner. The dictators of the soviet autocracy have been unable to find a trace of him, so they affirm; and there are reasons also for believing that this is true.

As for Jimmy, you will not be surprised to learn that Jimmy had not long been content with relief-work of any kind. He was young; and he had _seen_ things--there, in the eastern districts. By midsummer of 1915 he had resigned from the "C. R. B.," had made a difficult way to Paris, via Holland and England, had enlisted in the Foreign Legion, and had succeeded in getting himself transferred to the French Flying Corps.

Thus, months before we had officially abandoned our absurd neutrality, he was flying over the lines--bless him! If Jimmy never became a world-famous ace, well--there was a reason for that, too; the best of reasons. He was never a.s.signed to a combat squadron, for no one brought home such photographs as Jimmy; taken tranquilly, methodically, at no great elevation, and often far back of the German lines. His quiet daring was the admiration of his comrades; anti-aircraft batteries had no terrors for him; his luck was proverbial, and he grew to trust it implicitly, seeming to bear a charmed life.

But Susan's luck had failed her, at last. On Thanksgiving Day of 1917 she was wounded in the left thigh by a fragment of shrapnel, a painful wound whose effects were permanent. She will always walk slowly, with a slight limp, hereafter. Mona Leslie got her down as far as Paris by January 20, 1918, meaning to take her on to Mentone, where she had rented a small villa for three months of long-overdue rest and recuperation for them both. But on reaching Paris, Susan collapsed; the acc.u.mulated strain of the past years struck her down. She was taken to the comfortable little Red Cross hospital for civilians at Neuilly and put to bed. A week of dangerous exhaustion and persistent insomnia followed.

I knew nothing of it directly, at the moment. I knew only that on a certain day Miss Leslie had planned to start with Susan from Dunkirk for Mentone; I was waiting eagerly for word of their safe arrival in that haven of rest and beauty; and I was scheming like a junior clerk for my first vacation, for two weeks off, perhaps even three, that I might run down to them there. But no word came. Throughout that first week in Paris, Miss Leslie in her hourly anxiety neglected to drop me a line.

And then one night, as I sat vacantly on the edge of my bed in my hotel room at Evian, almost too weary to begin the tedious sequence of undressing and tumbling into it, came the second of my psychic reels, my peculiar visions; briefer, this one, than my first; but no less authentic in impression, and no less clear.

III

I saw, this time, the interior of a small white room, almost bare of furniture, evidently a private room in some thoroughly appointed modern hospital. The patient beneath the white coverlet of the single white-enamelled iron bed was Susan--or the wraith of Susan, so wasted was she, so still. My breath stopped: I thought it had been given me to see her at the moment of death; or already dead. Then the door of the small white room opened, and Jimmy--in his smart horizon-blue uniform with its coveted shoulder loop, the green-and-red _fouragere_ that bespoke the bravery of his entire _esquadrille_--came in, treading carefully on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet. As he approached the bedside Susan opened her eyes--great shadows, gleamless soot-smudges in her pitifully haggard face. It seemed that she was too weak even to greet him or smile; her eyes closed again, and Jimmy bent down to her slowly and kissed her. Then Susan lifted her right hand from the coverlet--I could feel the effort it cost her--and touched Jimmy's hair. There was no strength in her to prolong the caress. The hand slipped from him to her breast.... And my vision ended.

Its close found me on my knees on the tiled floor of my bedroom, as if I too had tried to go nearer, to bring myself close to her bedside, perhaps to bury my face in my hands against the white coverlet, her shroud; to weep there....

I sprang up, wildly enough now, with a harsh shudder, the terrified gasp of a brute suddenly stricken from ambush, aware only of rooted claws and a last crus.h.i.+ng fury of deep-set fangs.

Susan was dying. I knew not where. I could not reach her. But Jimmy had reached her. He had been summoned. He had not been too late.

There are moments of blind anguish not to be reproduced for others.

Chaos is everything--and nothing. It cannot be described.

There was nothing really useful I could do that night, not even sleep.

In those days, it was impossible to move anywhere on the railroads of France without the proper pa.s.ses and registrations of intention with the military authorities and the local police. I could, of course, suffer--that is always a human possibility--and I could attempt, muzzily enough, to think, to make plans. Where was it most likely that Susan would be? Was the hospital room that I had seen in Dunkirk, or in Nice, or at some point between--perhaps at Paris? It could hardly, I decided, be at Dunkirk; that stricken city, whose inhabitants were forced to dive like rats into burrows at any hour of the day or night. There was nothing to suggest the atmosphere of Dunkirk in that quiet, white-enamelled room. Nice, then--or Mentone? Hardly, I again reasoned; for Jimmy could not easily have reached them there. A day's leave; a flight from the lines, so comfortlessly close to Paris--that was always possible to the air-men, who were in a sense privileged characters, being for the most part strung with taut nerves that chafed and snapped under too strict a discipline. And in Paris there must be many such quiet, white-enamelled rooms. I decided for Paris.

Then I threw five or six articles and a bar of chocolate into my _musette_, a small water-proof pouch to sling over the shoulder--three years had taught me at least the needlessness of almost all Hillhouse necessities--and waited for dawn. It came, as all dawns come at last--even in January, even in France. And with it came a gulp of black coffee in the little deserted cafe down-stairs--and a telegram. I dared not open the telegram. It lay beside my plate while I stained the cloth before me and scalded my throat and furred my tongue. It was from Paris.

So my decision was justified, and now quite worthless.... I have no memory of the interval; but I had got with it somehow back to my room--that accursed blue envelope! Well----

"Susan at Red Cross hospital for civilians, Neuilly. All in, but no cause for real worry. Is sleeping now for first time in nearly a week. I must leave by afternoon. Come up to her if you possibly can. She needs you.

"JIMMY."

Four hours later all my exasperatingly complicated arrangements for a two-weeks' absence were made--the requisite motions had been the purest somnambulism--and by the ample margin of fifty seconds I had caught an express--to do it that courtesy--moving with dignity, at decent intervals, toward all that I lived by and despaired of and held inviolably dear. But the irony of Jimmy's last three words went always with me, a monotonous ache blurring every impulse toward hope and joy.

Susan was not dead, was not dying! "No cause for real worry." Jimmy would not have said that if he had feared the worst. It was not his way to shuffle with facts; he was by nature direct and sincere. No; Susan would recover--thank G.o.d for it! Thank--and then, under all, through all, over and over, that aching monotony: "She needs you. Jimmy. She needs you. Jimmy."

"Needs me!" I groaned aloud.

"_Plait-il?_" politely murmured the hara.s.sed-looking little French captain, my vis-a-vis.

"_Mille pardons, monsieur_," I murmured back. "_On a quelquefois des griefs particuliers, vous savez._"

"_Ah dame, oui!_" he sighed. "_Par le temps qui court!_"

"_Et ce pachyderme de train qui ne court jamais!_" I smiled.

"_Ah, pour ca--ca repose!_" murmured the little French captain, and shut his eyes.

"She needs you. Jimmy. She needs you. Jimmy. She needs----"

Then, miraculously, for two blotted hours I slept. But I woke again, utterly unrefreshed, to the old refrain: _She needs you--needs you--needs you...._

The little French captain was still asleep, snoring now--but softly--in his corner. Ah, lucky little French captain! _ca repose!_

IV

One afternoon, five or six days later, I was seated by the white-enamelled iron bed in the small white room. Susan had had a long, quiet, normal nap, and her brisk sparrow-eyed Norman nurse, in her pretty costume of the French Red Cross, had come to me in the little reception-room of the hospital, where I had been sitting for an hour stupidly thumbing over tattered copies of ancient American magazines, and had informed me--with rather an ambiguous twinkle of those sparrow eyes--that her patient had asked to see me as soon as she had waked, was evidently feeling stronger, and that it was to be hoped _M. le Capitaine_ would be discreet and say nothing to excite or fatigue the poor little one. "_Je me sauve, m'sieu_," she had added, mischievously grave; "_on ne peut avoir l'oeil a tout, mais--je compte sur vous._"

So innocently delighted had she been by her pleasant suspicions, it was impossible to let her feel how sharply her raillery had pained me. But I could not reply in kind. I had merely bowed, put down the magazine in my hand, and so left her--to inevitable reflections, I presume, upon the afflicting reticence of these otherwise so agreeable allies _d'outre mer_. Their education was evidently deplorable. One never knew when they would miss step, inconveniently, and so disarrange the entire social rhythm of a conversation.

"Ambo," said Susan, putting her hand in mine, "do you know at all how terribly I've missed you?" She turned her head weakly on her pillow and looked at me. "You're older, dear. You've changed. I like your face better now than I ever did."

I wrinkled my nose at her. "Is that saying much?" I grimaced.

"Heaps!" She attempted to smile back at me, but her lower lip quivered.

"Yours has always been my favorite face, you know, Ambo. Phil's is wiser--somehow, and stronger, too; and Jimmy's is sunnier, healthier, and--yes, handsomer, dear! n.o.body could call you handsome, could they?

But you're not ugly, either. Sister was adorably ugly. It was a daily miracle to see the lamp in her suddenly glow through and glorify everything. I used to wait for it. It's the only thing that has ever made me feel--humble; I never feel that way with you. I just feel satisfied, content."

"Like putting on an old pair of slippers," I ventured.

"That's it," sighed Susan happily, and closed her eyes.

"That's it!" echoed my familiar demon, "but no one but Susan would have admitted it."

As usual, I found it wiser to cut him dead.

"Well, dear," I said to Susan, "there's one good thing: you'll be able to use the old pair of slippers any time you need them now. I'm to be held in Paris, I find, for a three-months' job."

She opened her eyes again; disapprovingly, I felt.

"You shouldn't have done that, Ambo! You're needed at Evian; I know you are. It's bad enough to be out of things myself, but I won't drag you out of them! How could you imagine that would please me?"

"I hoped it would, a little," I replied, "but it hasn't any of it been my doing--Chatworth's wife's expecting a baby in a few weeks, and he wants to run home to welcome it; I'm to take on his executive work till he gets back. G.o.d knows he needs a rest!"

"As if you didn't, too!" protested Susan, inconsistently enough. Her eyes fell shut again; her hands slipped from mine. "Ambo," she asked presently, in a thread of voice that I had to lean down to her to hear, "have they told you I can never have a baby now?... Wasn't it lucky if that had to happen to some woman--it happened to me?"

No, they had not told me; and for the moment I could not answer her.

"Jimmy's wife is going to have a baby soon," added Susan.