by Zane Grey
My occupation during these leisure hours perhaps would strike my old friends East as idle, silly, mawkish. But I believe you will understand me.
I have the pleasure of doing nothing, and of catching now and then a glimpse of supreme joy in the strange state of thinking nothing. Tennyson came close to this in his “Lotus Eaters.” Only to see—only to feel is enough!
Sprawled on the warm sweet pine needles, I breathe through them the breath of the earth and am somehow no longer lonely. I cannot, of course, see the sunset, but I watch for its coming on the eastern wall of the canyon. I see the shadow slowly creep up, driving the gold before it, until at last the canyon rim and pines are turned to golden fire. I watch the sailing eagles as they streak across the gold, and swoop up into the blue, and pass out of sight. I watch the golden flush fade to gray, and then, the canyon slowly fills with purple shadows. This hour of twilight is the silent and melancholy one. Seldom is there any sound save the soft rush of the water over the stones, and that seems to die away. For a moment, perhaps, I am Hiawatha alone in his forest home, or a more primitive savage, feeling the great, silent pulse of nature, happy in unconsciousness, like a beast of the wild. But only for an instant do I ever catch this fleeting state. Next I am Glenn Kilbourne of West Fork, doomed and haunted by memories of the past. The great looming walls then become no longer blank. They are vast pages of the history of my life, with its past and present, and, alas! its future. Everything time does is written on the stones. And my stream seems to murmur the sad and ceaseless flow of human life, with its music and its misery.
Then, descending from the sublime to the humdrum and necessary, I heave a sigh, and pull myself together, and go in to make biscuits and fry ham. But I should not forget to tell you that before I do go in, very often my looming, wonderful walls and crags weave in strange shadowy characters the beautiful and unforgettable face of Carley Burch!
I append what little news Oak Creek affords.
That blamed old bald eagle stole another of my pigs.
I am doing so well with my hog-raising that Hutter wants to come in with me, giving me an interest in his sheep.
It is rumored someone has bought the Deep Lake section I wanted for a ranch. I don’t know who. Hutter was rather noncommittal.
Charley, the herder, had one of his queer spells the other day, and swore to me he had a letter from you. He told the blamed lie with a sincere and placid eye, and even a smile of pride. Queer guy, that Charley!
Flo and Lee Stanton had another quarrel—the worst yet, Lee tells me. Flo asked a girl friend out from Flag and threw her in Lee’s way, so to speak, and when Lee retaliated by making love to the girl Flo got mad. Funny creatures, you girls! Flo rode with me from High Falls to West Fork, and never showed the slightest sign of trouble. In fact she was delightfully gay. She rode Calico, and beat me bad in a race.
Adios, Carley. Won’t you write me?
GLENN.
No sooner had Carley read the letter through to the end than she began it all over again, and on this second perusal she lingered over passages—only to reread them. That suggestion of her face sculptured by shadows on the canyon walls seemed to thrill her very soul.
She leaped up from the reading to cry out something that was unutterable. All the intervening weeks of shame and anguish and fury and strife and pathos, and the endless striving to forget, were as if by the magic of a letter made nothing but vain oblations.
“He loves me still!” she whispered, and pressed her breast with clenching hands, and laughed in wild exultance, and paced her room like a caged lioness. It was as if she had just awakened to the assurance she was beloved. That was the shibboleth—the cry by which she sounded the closed depths of her love and called to the stricken life of a woman’s insatiate vanity.
Then she snatched up the letter, to scan it again, and, suddenly grasping the import of Glenn’s request, she hurried to the telephone to find the number of the hospital in Bedford Park. A nurse informed her that visitors were received at certain hours and that any attention to disabled soldiers was most welcome.
Carley motored out there to find the hospital merely a long one-story frame structure, a barracks hastily thrown up for the care of invalided men of the service. The chauffeur informed her that it had been used for that purpose during the training period of the army, and later when injured soldiers began to arrive from France.
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.
Carley, like a drowning woman, caught at straws. What a relief and joy to give up that endless nagging at her mind! For months she had kept ceaselessly active, by associations which were of no help to her and which did not make her happy, in her determination to forget. Suddenly then she gave up to remembrance. She would cease trying to get over her love for Glenn, and think of him and dream about him as much as memory dictated. This must constitute the only happiness she could have.
The change from strife to surrender was so novel and sweet that for days she felt renewed. It was augmented by her visits to the hospital in Bedford Park. Through her bountiful presence Virgil Rust and his comrades had many dull hours of pain and weariness alleviated and brightened. Interesting herself in the condition of the seriously disabled soldiers and possibility of their future took time and work Carley gave willingly and gladly. At first she endeavored to get acquaintances with means and leisure to help the boys, but these overtures met with such little success that she quit wasting valuable time she could herself devote to their interests.
Thus several weeks swiftly passed by. Several soldiers who had been more seriously injured than Rust improved to the extent that they were discharged. But Rust gained little or nothing. The nurse and doctor both informed Carley that Rust brightened for her, but when she was gone he lapsed into somber indifference. He did not care whether he ate or not, or whether he got well or died.
“If I do pull out, where’ll I go and what’ll I do?” he once asked the nurse.
Carley knew that Rust’s hurt was more than loss of a leg, and she decided to talk earnestly to him and try to win him to hope and effort. He had come to have a sort of reverence for her. So, biding her time, she at length found opportunity to approach his bed while his comrades were asleep or out of hearing. He endeavored to laugh her off, and then tried subterfuge, and lastly he cast off his mask and let her see his naked soul.
“Carley, I don’t want your money or that of your kind friends—whoever they are—you say will help me to get into business,” he said. “God knows I thank you and it warms me inside to find someone who appreciates what I’ve given. But I don’t want charity.… And I guess I’m pretty sick of the game. I’m sorry the Boches didn’t do the job right.”
“Rust, that is morbid talk,” replied Carley. “You’re ill and you just can’t see any hope. You must cheer up—fight yourself; and look at the brighter side. It’s a horrible pity you must be a cripple, but Rust, indeed life can be worth living if you make it so.”
“How could there be a brighter side when a man’s only half a man—” he queried, bitterly.
“You can be just as much a man as ever,” persisted Carley, trying to smile when she wanted to cry.
“Could you care for a man with only one leg?” he asked, deliberately.
“What a question! Why, of course I could!”
“Well, maybe you are different. Glenn always swore even if he was killed no slacker or no rich guy left at home could ever get you. Maybe you haven’t any idea how much it means to us fellows to know there are true and faithful girls. But I’ll tell you, Carley, we fellows who went across got to see things strange when we came home. The good old U. S. needs a lot of faithful girls just now, believe me.”
“Indeed that’s true,” replied Carley. “It’s a hard time for everybody, and particularly you boys who have lost so—so much.”
“I lost all, except my life—and I wish to God I’d lost that,” he replied, gloomily.
“Oh, don’t talk so!” implored Carley in distress. “Forgive me, Rust, if I hurt you. But I must tell you—that—that Glenn wrote me—you’d lost your girl. Oh, I’m sorry! It is dreadful for you now. But if you got well—and went to work—and took up life where you left it—why soon your pain would grow easier. And you’d find some happiness yet.”
“Never for me in this world.”
“But why, Rust, why? You’re no—no—Oh! I mean you have intelligence and courage. Why isn’t there anything left for you?”
“Because something here’s been killed,” he replied, and put his hand to his heart.
“Your faith? Your love of—of everything? Did the war kill it?”
“I’d gotten over that, maybe,” he said, drearily, with his somber eyes on space that seemed lettered for him. “But she half murdered it—and they did the rest.”
“They? Whom do you mean, Rust?”
“Why, Carley, I mean the people I lost my leg for!” he replied, with terrible softness.
“The British? The French?” she queried, in bewilderment.
“No!” he cried, and turned his face to the wall.
Carley dared not ask him more. She was shocked. How helplessly impotent all her earnest sympathy! No longer could she feel an impersonal, however kindly, interest in this man. His last ringing word had linked her also to his misfortune and his suffering. Suddenly he turned away from the wall. She saw him swallow laboriously. How tragic that thin, shadowed face of agony! Carley saw it differently. But for the beautiful softness of light in his eyes, she would have been unable to endure gazing longer.
“Carley, I’m bitter,” he said, “but I’m not rancorous and callous, like some of the boys. I know if you’d been my girl you’d have stuck to me.”
“Yes,” Carley whispered.
“That makes a difference,” he went on, with a sad smile. “You see, we soldiers all had feelings. And in one thing we all felt alike. That was we were going to fight for our homes and our women. I should say women first. No matter what we read or heard about standing by our allies, fighting for liberty or civilization, the truth was we all felt the same, even if we never breathed it.… Glenn fought for you. I fought for Nell.… We were not going to let the Huns treat you as they treated French and Belgian girls.… And think! Nell was engaged to me—she loved me—and, by God! She married a slacker when I lay half dead on the battlefield!”
“She was not worth loving or fighting for,” said Carley, with agitation.
“Ah! now you’ve said something,” he declared. “If I can only hold to that truth! What does one girl amount to? I do not count. It is the sum that counts. We love America—our homes—our women!… Carley, I’ve had comfort and strength come to me through you. Glenn will have his reward in your love. Somehow I seem to share it, a little. Poor Glenn! He got his, too. Why, Carley, that guy wouldn’t let you do what he could do for you. He was cut to pieces—”
“Please—Rust—don’t say any more. I am unstrung,” she pleaded.
“Why not? It’s due you to know how splendid Glenn was.… I tell you, Carley, all the boys here love you for the way you’ve stuck to Glenn. Some of them knew him, and I’ve told the rest. We thought he’d never pull through. But he has, and we know how you helped. Going West to see him! He didn’t write it to me, but I know.… I’m wise. I’m happy for him—the lucky dog. Next time you go West—”
“Hush!” cried Carley. She could endure no more. She could no longer be a lie.
“You’re white—you’re shaking,” exclaimed Rust, in concern. “Oh, I—what did I say? Forgive me—”
“Rust, I am no more worth loving and fighting for than your Nell.”
“What!” he ejaculated.
“I have not told you the truth,” she said, swiftly. “I have let you believe a lie.… I shall never marry
Glenn. I broke my engagement to him.”
Slowly Rust sank back upon the pillow, his large luminous eyes piercingly fixed upon her, as if he would read her soul.
“I went West—yes—” continued Carley. “But it was selfishly. I wanted Glenn to come back here.… He had suffered as you have. He nearly died. But he fought—he fought—Oh! he went through hell! And after a long, slow, horrible struggle he began to mend. He worked. He went to raising hogs. He lived alone. He worked harder and harder.… The West and his work saved him, body and soul.… He had learned to love both the West and his work. I did not blame him. But I could not live out there. He needed me. But I was too little—too selfish. I could not marry him. I gave him up.… I left—him—alone!”
Carley shrank under the scorn in Rust’s eyes.
“And there’s another man,” he said, “a clean, straight, unscarred fellow who wouldn’t fight!”
“Oh, no—I—I swear there’s not,” whispered Carley.
“You, too,” he replied, thickly. Then slowly he turned that worn dark face to the wall. His frail breast heaved. And his lean hand made her a slight gesture of dismissal, significant and imperious.
Carley fled. She could scarcely see to find the car. All her internal being seemed convulsed, and a deadly faintness made her sick and cold.
CHAPTER X
Carley’s edifice of hopes, dreams, aspirations, and struggles fell in ruins about her. It had been built upon false sands. It had no ideal for foundation. It had to fall.
Something inevitable had forced her confession to Rust. Dissimulation had been a habit of her mind; it was more a habit of her class than sincerity. But she had reached a point in her mental strife where she could not stand before Rust and let him believe she was noble and faithful when she knew she was neither. Would not the next step in this painful metamorphosis of her character be a fierce and passionate repudiation of herself and all she represented?