A Soldier's Place

by Thomas Hodd

  The Scotchman lay so long that when he attempted to move his thigh had stiffened so that every movement meant excruciating agony, and then the breaking light showed him where he was. He was directly behind the deserted trench and not far from the three dead Germans. A friendly crater yawned close by him and he slithered into it, for his only hope lay in rescue by the raiding party—and he was not ten yards from the new Hun trench.

  After he had got his breath again and heard no alarm given, he peered over the rim of his hiding place, and got the most horrible surprise of his life. The three dead Germans had come to life!

  There they were, grouped back of their Maxim, but the gun was clean, free of mud, and the cartridge belt was also ready for usage. Each man was as still as the dead men had been, but there was no mistaking their expectant crouch, the slight shift they made now and then to rest themselves.

  Angus understood in a flash. The Germans had suspected something after the box barrage, and had prepared for a surprise. Knowing that this low bit was their weakest point, they had removed the dead men in the night and placed a live trio in the position. They would not be recognized until the mist had cleared from the craters, and by that time no raid could be “pulled.” Angus thought of Captain Mack, so boyishly confident, and could picture him leading his wild gang in the rush across. What a slaughter it would be for the gunners at the Maxim.

  There was nothing Angus could do. He had lost his revolver and could not hope to wave a warning before he would be shot down by a sentry. He trembled in his torture of suspense, was suddenly aware that the gloom had lightened, that it was within minutes of zero hour, and perspiration beaded his gaunt features. He listened for the “pop” of the flare pistol that was to signal for the barrage, and wondered if he should chance all on an attempted warning or not.

  Then everything happened.

  He saw the flare soar, saw the Hun gunners tauten, and heard the sharp tap-tap-tap of Dan Hopper’s gun. It was the quick bark of his Lewis that was always heard as the little gunner took his post, his ranging shots, and as they came the trio of gunners at the Maxim simply collapsed as one man. They wavered drunkenly for a moment and then sank from view, one clawing frantically for support and upsetting the gun. The next instant the barrage descended, Captain Mack and his boys came charging through the mist, bombs smashed, rifles rattled, shouts and cheers co-mingled with guttural cries of “Kamerad! Kamerad!” And in ten minutes Angus McPhee was safe in his own trench.

  A stretcher-bearer worked to ease his pain and gave sharp orders to take the wounded man right on. But Angus protested.

  “Calm yersel’ a meenute, mon,” he called. “Tell Dan I want him.”

  Dan came, his “wood face” somewhat shameful. “I thought you had gone down to the RAP, Angus,” he said quickly, “or I wouldn’t have fired into those chaps. I won’t do it again, and anyway they tumbled over this time. It’s not that I want to hit them, but it was just a good ranging point.”

  “Dan,” said Angus softly, “dinna mind a’ a sour body like mysel’ barks aboot. I can mak’ mistakes, and hae done. Juist remember me last wur-rds tae ye is that a bullet wi’ never hurt a deid mon.”

  Priscilla’s Private

  Priscilla could not speak when they left the theatre. She clung to Doggy’s arm and followed him blindly to his car, and they were halfway home before he ventured to break the silence. “Good show, that,” he commented. “Worth the price all right.”

  Priscilla shuddered. “The price!” she exclaimed tragically. “Don’t Doggy, please don’t. You—you don’t understand.”

  He was quiet until they reached her house and then he spoke in a humble tone. “Would you rather I didn’t come in tonight?” he queried softly.

  Priscilla nodded, and stroked his arm with her gloved hand. “You’re a dear, Doggy,” she murmured. “You’re so considerate of me.”

  Then she went into the house. Her father, J. Thomas Perley, dealer in rugs, a rotund little man, sat in his big leather chair before the fire, his hands crossed on his round stomach, his eyes half-closed, like a Chinese mandarin. He looked up at her.

  “Where’s Doggy?” he asked mildly. “How did you like ‘Seven Days Leave’?”

  “He went home,” she answered tonelessly.

  “That so. How’s the show? Pretty good, isn’t it?” He rubbed the back of one hand with the palm of the other.

  Priscilla did not answer him. Her father was so—so vulgarly materialistic. She went to her room and after putting away her coat and hat sat at her dressing table and feasted her eyes on a small photo in a silver frame. It was the picture of a soldier, a private in the ranks, yet the cheap likeness epitomized to her the flower of Canadian chivalry. She worshipped the man who looked back at her from under the peak of an ordinary forage cap.

  Every night before she retired Priscilla gazed at that photo; every morning as she brushed her hair she smiled at her gallant soldier. For twelve long years he had been a part of her existence, though their meeting, acquaintance, and parting had been engulfed in thirty noisy minutes at Union Station.

  One paused when one met Priscilla. She was really beautiful; a chiselled blond beauty with delicate features and perfect skin; and most of all one noticed the romantic dreaminess that swam in her eyes. A thirst for romance had always been hers, had made her early one of those persons who live inner lives, and when the war came she was in an ecstasy. She looked for a brave, fresh-souled crusader who would go forth to battle as her champion.

  The bands playing, the rousing parades, the fluttering flags that coloured the city, thrilled her beyond words, yet she was disappointed. She joined a band of patriotic workers devoted to entertaining the soldiers and discovered that the lads in khaki were but a plebeian herd, and she had always been fiercely anxious to divide herself from the common people. Romance, she knew, could never have birth in a drab factory or smelly farm. Then came the Adventure.

  It was an evening in the early summer of ’16. A troop train was leaving the city and the Patriotic Workers were serving cocoa and chocolate to the soldiers. The warm dusk had let loose the secret lure of June and Priscilla had felt a feverish thrill ripple and quiver through her as she saw a tall, lithe figure, full of grace and power, come swiftly to her as if her longing had become vocal.

  “I beg your pardon,” said the soldier, “but is your…”

  It seemed but a case of mistaken identity yet Priscilla was sure that it was a meeting ordered by destiny. Her cheeks had throbbed and her breath had come fast. Then the band beside the train had crashed out music that drowned their voices and made it necessary for them to move closer together. Priscilla had lived years in those precious moments; she found her cavalier. He was tall and courteous, handsome and faintly smiling, and he possessed a quality of manliness that set her veins on fire. He was so gentle, so knightly, so romantic. There seemed at once a psychic bond between them, and Priscilla had suddenly realized that words were superfluous; all that either would say the other guessed; the unasked questions, the unspoken answers, there was no need to voice them. When the train pulled out amid a thunderous cheering she knew all she wanted to know; she had found a mate of her kindred and nothing else in the world mattered.

  Priscilla gave a little sob as she rose and began to make ready for bed. “Seven Days Leave” had been so poignantly realistic. It was so easy to see again that tall, strong figure in the dusk. She could feel her senses rioting with the remembrance of strong, warm arms around her during that one unforgettable moment of sweet caress, the remembrance of the way his hand had slipped into hers at parting, squeezing it, while a warm flood seemed to surge from it into her heart.

  She sobbed again before she turned out the light. Why had Fate been so cruel? Why had it to be that a careless maid would burn the card on which he had scribbled his address and regimental number and leave her with only her lover’s name to treasure? Harold Roy Heathl
and—how aristocratic it sounded! She had known instinctively that he was a gentleman despite his rank.

  The thought of money was inseparable from him; ease, culture, travel, privilege, spoke from every angle of his assured poise. And the faint condescension in his tone as he answered a bony, bowlegged sergeant who had attempted to hustle him back to the cars had been a final stamp of approval. The non-com had appeared completely bewildered.

  Priscilla could not sleep for a long time. After she had controlled the emotions aroused at the theatre her thoughts turned to Imogene Farrel. Imogene had been her playmate in youth and had always been her rival in romance. And Imogene’s mother had fought fierce duels with the House of Perley for social supremacy on Crescent Heights. Imogene was a willowy creature with a lovely brow and a liverish skin, and she had been an enthusiastic member of the Patriotic Workers. She had also captured the attentions of a khaki crusader, though her knight was harnessed in a Sam Browne, the only stipulation that her mother insisted on when the game began.

  The lieutenant had been a dashing dresser, blue of eye and red of hair, with a breathless way of looking at a girl, and he had been very kind to the crushed, bewildered, and heartbroken Priscilla who had just discovered that the key to her knight’s castle had been destroyed. In fact, he had been so sympathetic that Imogene’s mother, an old dame with a curving nose and a mouth for spilling bad news, had intimated to him in an intimate way that Priscilla most certainly should have been an actress—she had so much talent—and that her kind usually left their husbands or went in for bootlegging.

  Mrs. Perley somehow suspicioned the confidence and at a special tea divulged that the Farrels were nice people, but that she would be extremely sorry for the unfortunate who became entangled in a matrimonial alliance with Imogene. There were, she imparted, so many family scandals that would be like tentacles, reaching out from dark corners as soon as a domestic career was begun. Mrs. Perley was grey-haired and rather gaunt. She could smile sweetly or become acid-faced, as the situation demanded, and she smiled as she breathed that in her youth her conscience would never have permitted her such amorous contacts as those in which Imogene indulged.

  After absorbing all this information the lieutenant was filled to overflowing and he spilled some of it on his next visit to the Farrel stronghold, whereupon a slice of war more bitter than that which raged in the Ypres Salient was inaugurated at Crescent Heights. There were verbal barrages at close range and subtle mines were laid under family traditions. Armistice found them with battle honours about even—and the gay subaltern safely married in London.

  Month had succeeded month with agonizing slowness, but no tall cavalier in general’s regalia sought his lost lady in Toronto. There were no messages for Priscilla in the “personal” columns, and no inquiries were made regarding the long-defunct Patriotic Workers Association. A year passed and Priscilla pined unceasingly. She had set her heart on one of those military weddings, had pictured herself and her gallant champion passing under crossed swords held by his brother officers.

  Priscilla recalled, before she slept, all that had happened afterward. The enemies had abandoned open hostilities and were, to a certain extent, friends again. But she knew that the hatchet was only temporarily buried, and that Imogene had sworn that she would some day pull a coup de grace that would leave Priscilla in languishing sorrow. Now Imogene had gone to Ottawa for an extended visit and it was hinted that she was interested in a member of the Records Staff. Was she trying to trace, locate, and of course appropriate, Priscilla’s gentlemanly private?

  Imogene was a persistent creature, Priscilla knew, and would go to any length to achieve her purpose, and gradually, before she could get to sleep, a cold fear gripped her like the folds of a snake. Surely Imogene had never remained single all the years after the war without some definite aim in view. Priscilla decided, as she tried to answer the suggestions that tore at her heart, that in the morning she would call Doggy.

  Doggy was her mainstay. He was a faithful, brown-eyed follower, rugged and dependable as a mastiff, not handsome in any sense of the word, but a useful and passable escort and a comfort in any trouble. He had two handicaps that barred him from consideration as a life partner: First, he had not an atom of romance in his makeup; he was crudely matter-of-fact and there was no hope of his ever changing; and secondly, his name was Higgins, Henry Rupert Higgins, and Priscilla positively could not think of assuming such a surname.

  Doggy had been a little difficult at first, until she had told him about her private; since then he had seemed content just to be her companion. Best of all, he had clashed with Mrs. Farrel and so had been inoculated against Imogene’s deceitful charms. No, she couldn’t think of marrying Doggy, but he was so useful, and one knew, instinctively, that when the time came he would abdicate generously, without heroics.

  She called him in the morning. Her voice was husky. “Doggy,” she implored. “Come right over. I’ve had a dream.”

  “A dream! A—a dream?” he questioned. “You’re not joshing me, are you? This is my busy morning.” Doggy was in the insurance business, and doing well.

  “Doggy—come!” Priscilla’s voice was tragic. Doggy came.

  “I had an awful dream,” she told him, her lips pale and drawn as she faced him in hasty deshabille. “Harold was calling me to come to him, and I couldn’t answer. Oh, Doggy,” she made a soft little moan and allowed him to soothe her. “I’ve got to find him. I know that he’s looking for me. Won’t you help me?”

  “You bet,” said Doggy, after a look at his watch. “What’ll we do this morning?”

  “You don’t understand, dear,” she said patiently, “how difficult it is. I only saw him half an hour and all he knows is that my first name is Priscilla. You see I told him I would explain all the rest when I wrote, and then the ma-maid….Doggy, what can I do?”

  “Write to Ottawa and get in touch with some of his battalion,” said Doggy briskly, flipping forth a notebook from sheer force of habit. “Then ask about a Heathland on their roll. You could find out…”

  “I can’t,” she wailed. “I didn’t—I don’t know what battalion he was with, maybe it was the artillery. I—it was so short a time…and he looked so wonderful, Doggy, and that’s all I know.” She gave a tiny sob. “He wouldn’t be with them long anyway,” she went on, sniffing. “He’d be an adjutant or a general or something. I know he would, he had such a figure, and his profile was marvellous.”

  It was hard to make things clear to Doggy, he asked so many questions about silly details, but she was kind to him. Two days passed and she grew pale and thin. She stood before the mirror and viewed critically her pallid but bewitching beauty, and decided that she needed an excursion downtown. For two nights her worries had denied her the merciful anodyne of sleep. She had dreamed twice, though, of finding her princely lover, and she had had a nightmare in which Imogene had let Heathland marry her and had then tamed him like a poodle.

  It was Doggy who proposed that they visit the Vetcraft display downtown, and Priscilla was grateful to him. Doggy was, in a way, sensitive about matters pertaining to the veterans. A finger lost in boyhood, the one needed in wartime to press a rifle trigger, had prevented him from enlisting, though he had tried.

  In the third row, next the exhibits of woodcraft, they inspected novelties bed patients had made—and it was there that Priscilla grew hysterical. There were tea mats and dainty things made of bead work, dainty squares and oblongs and cunning patterns, and one of a delicate green shade seemed to rise up to meet her. She stared at it, and clutched Doggy. “Look!” she gasped. “I knew it—my dream—see—he’s—get it, buy it. Ask the man.”

  Doggy looked. Across an intricate maple leaf scroll careful letters spelled one word: “Priscilla.” He turned to find the attendant.

  The man who came was anxious to please, and after Priscilla had pleaded with him, with her lovely face upturned to his, he pro
mised to move mountains, if need be, in order to discover the maker of the bead mat. Then Doggy took her home.

  She was radiant as she bade him goodnight. All her hopes and dreams were returning like a sunrise, and it was doubly sweet to let her mind tell like a rosary its memories of that star-like evening at Union Station. She made plans before she could go to sleep. There would be a smart suburban house, with a maid’s room on the third floor, a sun porch, and a double garage. She would have a Chinese rug for the living room—her father could make it a wedding gift—and special shrubbery for the lawn. And Mrs. Farrel would be invited to the reception, it would be such an opportunity to snub her, and….

  Priscilla sat up in bed and stared into the darkness as if a horrible specter had entered her room, and in truth one had. Working beads…a bed! Oh—oh—oh! Her tall romantic cavalier, so full of grace and power, helpless in a hospital bed. It could not be, it must not be!

  A wan and tearful Priscilla called Doggy in the morning, but before she could spread her fears he had thrilled her with fresh information. “I’m just back from that Vetshop,” he boomed. “The chap there has found out about that bead work. It was special stuff from down east.”

  “Down east—where?” She flung the words at him. “Away down in New Brunswick.”

  A short hesitation, then she spoke softly. “Doggy, will you go down there with me?”

  She could hear him gasp. “Down—down there? Say, why don’t you write first and find out if…”

  “Will you go or not, Doggy?” she asked again, and she made her voice sound as final as possible.

  “What—hold on, Priscilla. Why—er—yes, I’ll go.”

  “You’re a dear,” she cooed. “You don’t understand, but I do. We’ll start tomorrow and it won’t take long.” Then she hung up the receiver.

  Doggy was ready according to schedule. It was a sharp test, a strain on his loyalty, but he responded nobly and did not voice a regret as he was carried farther and farther from his business. Priscilla’s cheeks grew pink as she studied a timetable. It would be noon when they reached their destination, and there should be no delay in reaching the hospital.