Part 7 (2/2)
The Young Doctor's eyebrows knitted. His mouth set. He went on: ”This man should have abandoned his military conscience. But no--,”
the Doctor shook his head sadly, ”he was a Prussian before he was a man! He carefully figured it out, that it takes four years to make a doctor, and three months to make a soldier, so to kill a doctor is as good as killing a dozen men. It's all very scientific, this German warfare--scientific and fanatical; Nietzsche and Mahomet, what a perfect alliance it is between the Kaiser and the Sultan.”
Then it came to us again that Germans, on seas, in submarines, in air, in their planes bombing hospitals, and on land, looting and dynamiting villages--in all their martial enterprises, think unlike the rest of civilized men. They are a breed apart--savage, material-minded, diabolic, unrestrained by fear or love of G.o.d, man or devil. We talked of these things for a time; but something, the quiet beauty of the garden maybe, took the edge off our hate.
And gradually it became apparent to me, at least, that the Young Doctor was marking time until we should have the sense to tell him something of the Eager Soul. What did he care for the war? For the Prussians? For their Babylonian philosophy? For his wounded hand?
What were gardens made for in this drab earth, if not for sanctuaries of lovers? One does not go to a garden to hate, to buy, or sell, to fight, to philosophize, but to adore something or someone, somehow or somewhere. And the Young Doctor was in his Holy Temple, and we knew it. So Henry asked: ”You received your letter?” And when he thanked us for our trouble, Henry asked again: ”Did she tell you that the Gilded Youth was there at her hospital?”
”Only in a pencilled postscript after she had decided to send the letter to me by you,” answered the Doctor.
That sounded good to me. Evidently she had written to the Young Doctor before the Gilded Youth had appeared. Also presumably she had not written to the Gilded Youth. If she had written to him after the air raid that had killed the head nurse, it would indicate that she had turned to the Young Doctor, in an emotional crisis, and that he was still a safe bet, as against the Gilded Youth. The only question which occurred to me to develop this fact was this: ”Did she tell you that she was made a.s.sistant to the new head nurse that came to supply the place of the one who was slain by the Germans?” Henry looked at me as if he thought the question was unfair.
”Yes,” laughed the Doctor, ”in the very first line.”
”What odds are you giving now, Bill?” asked Henry bitterly.
”In the very first line,--” we could all three see the Eager face, the proud blue eyes, the pretty effective hands brus.h.i.+ng the straying crinkly strands of red hair from her forehead, as she sat there in the bare little nurses' room, bringing her first promotion in pride to the young Doctor. Perhaps he did not realize all that it meant. For you see he was very young. Certainly he did not understand about the odds and repeated the word in a question. Henry cut in, ”Oh, nothing, only that night after they went walking in the hospital yard, Bill made me give him three to five. Now I ought to have two to one. It's all over but the shouting.” And Henry laughed at the Young Doctor's bewilderment; but the young Doctor looked at his bandaged hand and shook his head. The walk in the hospital yard was disturbing news to him.
”Ah, don't worry about that,” Henry rea.s.sured him. ”Why, man, you ought to have heard what she said about you!” And Henry, being a good-natured sort, told the Doctor what the Eager Soul had said to the Gilded Youth in the hospital compound, while the buzzing monsters in the air were singing their nightingale songs of death in the moonlight.
We left the Young Doctor after he had squeezed out of us all the news we had of the girl. Long after we had pa.s.sed through the garden gate, out into the white, gravel-paved court under the proud arch and into the crooked, low, grey-walled canyon of the street, we thought of the Young Doctor sitting there reading blue eyes into china asters, red hair into dahlias, pink cheeks into the phlox, and hearing ineffable things whispered among the leaves of the melancholy yew tree. And all that, in a land of waste and desolation, with war's alarms on every wind.
And we thought that he looked more like a poet than a Doctor even in his uniform; and less like a soldier than either. Such is the alchemy of love in youth!
CHAPTER VI
WHEREIN WE BECOME A TRIO AND JOURNEY TO ITALY
As the autumn deepened we found our Red Cross work ending. This work had taken Henry and me from our quiet country newspaper offices in Kansas and had suddenly plunged us into the turmoil of the big war. For days and days we had been riding in motor cars along the line in France from Rouen to Bacarat and often ambulances had hauled us--always more or less frightened--up near the trenches of the front line. We had tramped through miles of hospitals and had snuggled eagerly into the little dugouts and caves that made the first aid posts. We had learned many new and curious things--most of which were rather useless in publis.h.i.+ng the Wichita Beacon or the Emporia Gazette; as, for instance, how to wear a gas mask, how to fire a trench mortar, how to look through a trench periscope, and how to duck when a sh.e.l.l comes in. Also we had stood G.o.d-father to a serial love affair that began on the boat coming over and was for ever being ”continued in our next.” And it was all--riding along the line, huddling in abris, sneaking scared to death along trenches, and ducking from the sh.e.l.ls--all vastly diverting. We had grown fat on it; not that we needed just that expression of felicity, having four hundred pounds between us. But it was almost finished and we were sadly turning our faces westward to our normal and reasonably honest lives at home, when Medill McCormick came to Paris and tempted us to go to Italy. It was a great temptation; ”beyond the Alps lies Italy,” as a copy book sentence has lure in it, and as a possible journey to a new phase of the war, it caught us; and we started.
So we three stood on the platform, at the station at Modane, in Savoy, a few hundred yards from the Italian border, one fair autumn day, and our heavy clothes--two Red Cross uniforms and a pea-green hunting suit, made us sweat copiously and unbecomingly. The two Red Cross uniforms belong to Henry and me; the pea-green hunting outfit belonged to Medill McCormick, congressman at large from Illinois, U. S. A. He was going into Italy to study the situation.
As a congressman he felt that he should be really informed about the war as it was the most vital subject upon which he should have to vote. So there we stood, two Kansas editors, and an Illinois congressman, while the uniforms of the continent brushed by us, in uniforms ourselves, after a fas.h.i.+on, but looking conspicuously civilian, and incorrigibly middle western. Medill in his pea-green hunting outfit looked more soldierly than we. For although we wore Sam Browne belts, to indicate that we were commissioned officers--commissioned as Red Cross Colonels--and although we wore Parisian uniforms of correct cut, we knew in our hearts that they humped in the back and flopped in the front, and sagged at the shoulders. A fat man can't wear the modern American army uniform without looking like a sack of meal. Henry fell to calling the tunics our Mother Hubbards. We looked long and enviously at the slim-waisted boys in khaki; but we never could get their G.o.d-like effects. For alas, the American uniform is high-waisted, and a fat man never was designed for a Kate Greenaway! So we paced the platform at Modane trying to look unconcerned while the soldiers of France, Italy, Russia, Belgium, England and Rumania walked by us, clearly wondering what form of military freak we were. For the American Red Cross uniform was not so familiar in those lat.i.tudes as it was to be a month later, when Major Murphy came swinging through Modane with forty-eight carloads of Red Cross supplies, a young army of Red Cross nurses and workers, and half a million dollars in ready cash to spend upon the stricken cities of Northern Italy choked with refugees fleeing before the German invasion!
Today, the American flag floats from a hundred flag-poles in Italian cities, from Venice to Naples. Under that flag the American Red Cross has soup kitchens, food stations, aid bureaus for civilian relief all along the line of the invader in Italy, and the Red Cross uniform which made the soldiers' eyes bug out there at the border in the early autumn, now is familiar and welcome in Italy. But we three unsoldierly looking civilians took that uniform into a strange country.
[Ill.u.s.tration: A fat man can't wear the modern American Army uniform without looking like a sack of meal]
Our first evening in Italy was spent in Genoa. And coming direct from Paris, where men out of uniform were few, the thing that opened our mouths in wonder was the number of men we saw. There were worlds and worlds of men in Genoa; men in civilian clothes.
The streets were black with men. Straw hats, two piece suits, gay neck-ties--things which were as remote from France as from Mars, figures that recalled the ancient days of one's youth, before the war; days in New York, for instance, where men in straw hats and white crash were common. These things we saw with amazement in Genoa! And then our eyes caught the flashy bands on their arms--bands that indicated that these men are in the industrial reserves, not drafted because they are doing industrial war work. But for all of these industrial reservists there was an overplus of men in Genoa.
It is a seaport and there were ”the market girls and fishermen, the shepherds and the sailors, too,” a crowd gathered from the world's ends, and we sat under the deep arches before a gay cafe, listened to New York musical hits from the summer's roof gardens, and watched the show. In that day--only three weeks before the German invasion--the war was a long way from Genoa. At the next table to us an American sea-faring man was telling an English naval officer about the adventures of three sailing s.h.i.+ps which had bested two submarines three days before in the Mediterranean; some Moroccan sailors were flirting across two tables with some pretty Piedmontese girls, and inside the cafe, the harp, the flute and the violin were doing what they could to make all our hearts beat young! A picture show across the street sprayed its gay crowd over the sidewalks and a vaudeville house down stairs gathered up rivulets of humanity from the spray. Somewhere near by was a dance, for we heard the rhythmic swish and lisp of young feet and the gay cry of the music. Here and there came a soldier; sometimes we saw a woman in mourning; but uniforms and mourners were uncommon. The war was a tale that is told.
But the next day in Rome the war moved into our vision again. But even if Rome was more visibly martial than Genoa, still it was not Paris. One could see gay colours upon women in Rome; one might see straw hats upon the men, and in the stores and shops the war did not fill every window as it filled the shop windows of Paris. Rome was taking the war seriously, of course, but the war was not the tragedy to Rome before the invasion that it was to France.
Yet there was to me a change in Rome--from the Rome one knew who had been there eight years before--a change stranger and deeper than the change one felt in coming from Rome to Paris. This new Rome was a cleaner Rome, a more prosperous Rome, a happier Rome.
Something had been happening to the people. They wore better clothes, they seemed to live in cleaner tenements; they certainly had a different squint at life from the Romans of the first decade of this century. One heard two answers to the question that arose in one's heart. One group said: ”It is prosperity. Italy never has seen such prosperity as she has seen during the past ten years.
There has been work for everyone, and work at good wages. So you see the working people well-clad, well-housed, clean and contented.”
Another answered the question thus: ”The Socialists have done it.
We have had plenty of work in other years; but we have worked for small wages, and have lived in squalor. We still work as we always have worked, but we get better pay, and we get our better pay in many ways; first in relatively higher wages, next in safeguards thrown around labour, and restrictions on the predatory activities of capital. The Socialists in government have forced many reforms in housing, in labour conditions, in the distribution of the profits of labour and capital, and we are living in hope of better things rather than in fear of worse!” One may take his choice of answers; probably the truth lies between the two. Prosperity has done something; socialism in government has done something, and each has promoted the other!
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