by Howard Fast
He was extremely fortunate in having a bed upon the window, for it speedily became his chief and only diversion. For hours he would lie there, staring down the slope, watching the soldiers, who sometimes came close, who sometimes came up to the windows with cigarettes. They were Americans, and until they went up to the front, it was good to speak with them. And after they were gone, after an interval, more came.
Always they were coming and going, quartering themselves in the square of the little town. And sometimes, more often of late, but still rarely and only when a strong wind was blowing, a faint, scarcely perceptible muttering would be heard from the east. The muttering would send cold shivers chasing up and down his spine and leave him with beads of sweat upon his brow.
It was not many days after that he asked the nurse for a mirror. When she gave it to him, he stared into it and studied himself. He was woefully thin. He had been a boy; now he was a man, and aging. At the very edge of his temple, he could trace a few gray hairs. The cheeks were sunken, his lips narrower and longer. No longer did they appear ready to break into a smile at the least suggestion. It was curiously bizarre.
Upon the same day, he asked the nurse whether she would write a letter for him. With a pad in her decidedly competent hands, she sat beside him, while he closed his eyes and began to speak.
“Inez,” he said. “—I mean I am writing to her. You can start it by—”
But how could he start it—?
“Dear Inez—” He paused, and then: “God only knows what you have thought in this time. Perhaps that I am dead. I would have written, Inez, but I could not. You see—”
He asked of the nurse: “Would you tell her?” And when she nodded:
“Inez, I was wounded, but now I am gaining back my health. I will not be able to go again to the trenches, so they tell me that when I am well enough, they will send me back to America. And that should be in less than two months, Inez, so you see that it has all been for the best—” His voice trailed away; opening his eyes, he stared out of the window.
“Yes?” the nurse inquired impatiently.
“—It has all been for the best. You must not worry, Inez, for I am not badly hurt. In fact, I shall be quite as sound as new. It will be good to come back again—to see the Steer’s Head, to sit in the garden, to plant—”
But how could he, now that his arm was gone? How could he be anything but a useless hulk—?
“—It is very beautiful where I am, Inez, far back from the front in a château that must have belonged to some very wealthy person. I am near a window, and I can look out of it and down a broad, grassy slope, not so different from the one at home. Always there are soldiers passing, and yesterday a bird like an English sparrow hopped over my bed.”
The nurse was looking her impatience with frosty questioning.
“It is best, is it not, Inez? You must not be afraid because I am not writing this. I am not quite well enough for that yet. I should like to say more, but I cannot now. I love you, though, Inez.… I always shall.”
“And that is all?” the nurse asked him.
“Yes, that is all.”
She left him, and he was alone, staring out of the high window, something welling up in his throat. After all, he had not told her—but he could not. It was too bitter, too ghastly, too much of a farce. And would it not be more so when he returned? It came to him that in every way it would be better if he did not return. Why should he? At the very most, he was but a stranger. Before he had been able to work—now that was denied to him.
But why all this thought, when he knew with terrible certainty of conviction that he must return?
There was the garden, and there was the Steer’s Head, and all of it was calling—calling with a sly mocking inflection. There was Inez.
10
FREQUENTLY he thought of Inez as he healed. Her letters he read through and through again, until they fell into pieces. She sent him cakes and dainties, and photographs she took about the house, and once she sent him a dozen tea roses, dry, but with their perfume lingering. From her letters he imagined that she suspected, but he could not be sure.
He learnt that he had internal injuries, and that he had been badly cut about the right breast. Slowly he mended; it was almost a month before he could leave his bed. Then they allowed him to walk put upon the lawn, but slowly and carefully, for he was still weak. For the first time he saw what manner of place he was in. It was a rather handsome stucco house, towered at each end, and adjoining what seemed to be a large gray chapel, also transformed into a hospital. The road was on the opposite side of it; ambulances came and went; also upon the other side were two lines of frame shelters.
For two more weeks he was there; then he was discharged, hardly yet well. But there were so many others—so very many. By stages he went to the coast, where he finally took ship for America. He had written before his going, and he knew that when his ship docked in New York, they would be there waiting. How certain he was of that! They would be there—Inez and the little old woman.
The way was slow. In his overseas uniform, his sleeve pinned up to his shoulder, he would walk the deck, steps hesitating and calculated, feeling vaguely uncomfortable at the pitying, sympathetic expressions upon the faces of the passengers. There were other disabled men returning with him, and, as well as he might, he sought only their companionship.
The going reminded him of the coming: the same fear of submarines, the same destroyers buzzing about, the same, endless, unchanging expanse of water.
And at last he came to New York, and they felt their way up through the Narrows, halted at the Island, and finally nosed into the dock with a swarm of puffing tugs at their heels. He stood upon a part of the deck where he could look down on the pier, but in the welter of upturned faces he could separate no one from another. All of it was noise and confusion. He allowed himself to move with the press to the gangplank, and then down to the pier.
They made a passage, and they gave way before him, as, still slowly, he moved along. So many people! As though it were all a dream, he went forward, step upon step, the crowd closing after him, swallowing up those others who came.
After all, Inez had not come.
Then she found him. She darted out, caught his hand, looked at him. She cried: “Johnny, Johnny—Johnny!”
And he was holding her to him, unmindful of the pain from his wounds, unmindful of the surging mob. Her face turned up, he kissed her. He saw that she was crying.
“Johnny,” she whispered, “look at me.”
“You see,” he said to her, “I couldn’t tell you before. But now you see. Inez—don’t do that.”
“I am not crying, Johnny. I don’t care. So long as I have you again. I love you. Look at me.”
Into her deep-colored eyes he gazed, and then he caught hold of her and moved along. “Come, let’s get out of this. Your grandmother is here? Then come.”
He felt her arm about his waist, felt the manner of her clinging to him, felt the pain of her against his still-tender wounds.
But it was such pain as he gloried in, such pain as to mingle itself with her who was pressing against him. Actually, she was leading him, guiding him through the press. She was small, though, smaller than he would have thought, smaller than he remembered her as being. Her mass of dark hair was tucked beneath her turban, but every so often she would glance up at him, smile into his eyes. Thinner, too—and there was something about her face—
Then they were out of it, and before the car. Drawing him in, she pressed him to a seat. The door closed, and they slid away. He saw that he was between Mrs. Vetcheri and Inez. Inez was talking, quickly and happily, but much too obviously so. The sleeve was towards her, and he did not think that Mrs. Vetch en had noticed it.
“I lost my arm,” he said bluntly. “My right one.”
Sudden silence from Inez; then Mrs. Vetchen looked at him, smiling slightly through her glasses. “You are not afraid, are you?” she asked him.
But Inez
laughed, pressing close to him, lifting her eyes to his face, raising her hand to touch his cheek. “How thin you are. We shall have to fix that. Tell me, Johnny, did you get all my letters? And the cake? You were able to eat cake, weren’t you, Johnny?”
“Yes, I was able to eat cake.”
“We’re going all the way by auto,” she said hastily. “You won’t mind that, will you, Johnny? It is better than a stuffy train, at any rate.”
He said: “I can’t go back with you—now.”
“But why?”
Mrs. Vetchen was looking at him from behind her spectacles, her eyes wide with a peculiar gleam. In the diffused light she seemed almost lovely and not so old. Even smaller than Inez, she was, with a mouse-like pertness to her face. Very softly she said to him: “John Preswick, what are you saying? I am an old woman, so I do not see these things in the same light. And I am no longer a romanticist. You have never disobeyed me, John Preswick. If I were to tell you to return—order you to, what would you say?”
Thinking that they were making it more difficult than it needed to be, he shrugged his shoulders. “I cannot work now. I cannot come back as a beggar. After all, I am a stranger.”
“But are you a stranger, John Preswick? And if you do not come back, what will you do?”
“I’ll have a pension. And then—I suppose I’ll find ways—” There was California, but he could not put that to his lips.
“I say you must come back,” the old woman said, a trace of the old sharpness returning to her voice.
And as he turned to Inez then, he saw that she was smiling, and that in her smile there was a knowingness larger than herself. She drew forward, half off her seat, faced him, and put both hands upon his shoulders, just at his neck. “Johnny—” she whispered to him, leaning so close that her face almost touched his—“Johnny, there is so much that you do not know, that you never can. But, Johnny, I don’t care. You see, it doesn’t matter. Go ahead, kiss me, Johnny.”
11
THERE was a strangeness to the last stretch of road, a wonderful familiarity too. He did not see the Steer’s Head, for the car was a closed one, but he saw the hedge as they passed it: tall, broad, green, calm with the dignity of many, many years. They drew up before the gate to the garden, Inez going out first, he following her, and then old Mrs. Vetchen. He opened the gate, holding it for Inez and her grandmother, and after that followed them in, closing the gate behind them. With his back to it he stood, staring at the garden, staring at the two, who had gone forward until they noticed he was not with them.
“Johnny,” Inez called softly; but she saw his eyes, and she was silent as she walked towards him. “Go in, Granny,” she whispered.
“You missed it, didn’t you?” she smiled, placing herself at his side, working her arm into his. “But it has not changed, Johnny. I knew you would like that. You were always speaking of the garden, always writing of it. You did love it, didn’t you, Johnny? The pinks are out, and the tulips. If you go near enough, the peppermint smells like a huge dish of taffy.”
“No, it has not changed,” he agreed.
“And Frank was asking about you, Johnny. I think it was the third or the fourth time in my whole life I heard him speak. But, Johnny, can you look at this and not feel glad? There are so many things to do. You can still plant. You can still—love me.”
So tiny was she, staring up at him with her anxious, narrow face. Walking over to one of the concrete benches, he sat down. She dropped beside him and laid a hand on his knee. But she did not speak, sensing, perhaps, what was in his mind; for his head was tilted, and he was staring over the hedge at the Steer’s Head. Large, and round, and bluff, it was, jutting up, but tired, more like an old cow than a steer. He could see the tree upon the top; he could see the side of bare rock.
“I remember,” he mused, “that when I was first wounded, I thought I was here in the garden, because of the scent—”
His voice trailed away; he stood up and said, “Let us go inside, Inez.”
And in that manner he came back, as he had said he would come back, and after a time it seemed that he had not been away at all, so relentless was the garden, and the house, and the fields, and the Steer’s Head in claiming anything that had once been under his fingers. He fell into his old ways, doffing his uniform for a loose white shirt and gray trousers; however, he slept in the house, and, as yet, he did not work, for his wound was not entirely healed. He found that there was a good pleasure in walking over the grounds, in sitting in the garden, or in perching himself upon the stone wall and puffing on his pipe. Sometimes, frequently in fact, he was with Inez, but, again, he would desire to be alone. In the quiet, he luxuriated; nor did he ever, after that very first day, attempt to reason out or to justify his position in the household. But by now he had come to be almost a part of the place. Even those people who came out of the north in their long cars never questioned him, but accepted him as they did the house or the hedge. And in the attitude of the servants, a certain deference had appeared. There were few servants; the place was so small. He still would come and sit in the kitchen, in the great, indented hearth, and often Inez would be with him. He would sit, and smoke, and say very little, watching, his gaze curiously intent, Mary going about her work. Once he dropped his pipe into the blaze, and, as there was a bar connecting the two large fire-dogs, he could not, with only a single hand, bend and reach for it, having nothing to balance himself by. She went across, and she picked it up for him, and as she gave it to him, she looked for a moment into his eyes, something passing over her face. From that time she was wonderfully good to him, though he could never quite understand.
And sometimes Frank would come in and crouch with him by the hearth, pulling upon an ancient corncob, his leather face as expressionless as the bare earth. Frank had not changed. Nothing had—except him.
Once Frank stopped him outside near the clump of apple trees. “Johnny,” the old man said; and John Preswick halted and waited. It was not often that Frank paused to speak.
“Johnny, how did you come by losing your arm?”
“A shell burst, and there was a piece of shrapnel. It struck me at the shoulder and raked downward and out. There were other pieces too, but there must have been one large one.”
“You never saw who it was tried to kill you, Johnny?”
“Never.”
“And he never saw you?”
“No.”
Old Frank folded back his lips against almost toothless gums, grinned, raised a hand and rubbed it to his wrinkled face, nodding his head. Then he shambled off. But of a night, when he sat with John Preswick in the kitchen, he would unbend still further and speak in a curious, disconnected way. If John Preswick had ever turned himself to listen, he might have drawn a meaning into the old man’s words, but he paid no more attention to him than one does to the sighing of the wind, or the crunching of earth beneath one’s feet.
Yet when Frank worked in the garden he found a certain tight satisfaction in watching him, in watching the angles of his brown hands, nimble, but clod-like. One time when Frank was clipping the hedge after having watered it until it sparkled like a high jade comb in the sun, he asked whether he might use the shears. But with his left hand he could not manage them, large and awkward as they were, and, something of a droop to his shoulders, he gave them back. Old Frank stared after him as he walked away.
And it was best to be by himself, to go off and sit beneath a tree, or to have the garden for his own. At times even Inez was too much. When he was alone, he could have something the others did not understand. He could think of many things: of the long, arduous training, of that single night in the trenches, of the hospital with the high windows, of the swaying back of the stretcher-bearer. They thought he desired to forget; but they understood so little.
And again he would sit in the room with the portraits, stare at them, at the one without the arm, at the boy. Frequently he would follow that by looking into a mirror. It was strange that already his
hair should be graying, so young as he was. And it was strange that a yellow tinge was creeping into his skin, stretched so tightly over his cheekbones. He felt an active distaste for the straightening line of his lips.
His lips had been like a girl’s, ready, eager for a smile; now they were hardening, hardening—
He thought, when he kissed Inez, that rightly she should have some disgust; but that was not so. He thought that his arm should have repulsed her; but it did not. She was an incomprehensible sort of a creature, more so now than ever. It was she who insisted that the marriage be put off no longer.
They were married in Charleston, a lonesome little wedding with no more than a dozen people there; and almost immediately after that they drove back to the Steer’s Head. And that night he lay with her on his breast, and with her hair across his face. She was so soft, and frail, and as irresolute as a child; and as easy to sway as a child; and as easy to mold.
And life became this: to rise, to walk in the fields, to sit in the garden, to plant a little, to read in the evenings. It was a meaningless, a purposeless, an effortless existence; but, somehow, they never questioned it. It was not to be questioned; it was their life.
Before Inez’s child was born, the old lady died. She would have preferred to live for the two remaining months, since she was quite confident that it would be a boy. For as long as she could remember there had been no boy in the line—not, indeed, since the time of the name of Preswick. But now, again, the name was Preswick, and she knew well it would be a boy.
Until the end, she was calm, in complete possession of her very brisk senses, and not uncheerful. Calling them in, she ordered the doctor and the nurses out and told them to sit one upon either side of her bed. Her room was a large one, being in the forward part of the left wing. When she was gone, she assured them, it should be theirs. From her window could be seen most of the slope to the Steer’s Head and the hill itself. Now it was bathed in the heavy white light of morning.