Читать книгу Wings of the Wind - Credo Fitch Harris - Страница 4

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At last out of khaki, and dressed in conventional evening clothes, I felt as if I were indeed writing the first words of another story on the unmarred page of the incoming year. As I entered the library my mother, forgetting that it was I who owed her deference, came forward with outstretched arms and a sound in her voice like that of doves at nesting time. Dad's welcome was heartier, even though his eyes were dimmed with happy tears. And old Bilkins, our solemn, irreproachable butler, grinned benignly as he stood waiting to announce dinner. What a wealth of affection I had to be grateful for!

I did not lack gratitude, but with the old year touching the heels of the new, and Time commanding me to get in step, my return to civil life held few inducements. Instead of a superabundance of cheer, I had brought from France jumpy nerves and a body lean with over training—natural results of physical exhaustion coupled with the mental reaction that must inevitably follow a year and a half of highly imaginative living.

But there was another aspect less tangible, perhaps more permanent—and all members of combat divisions will understand exactly what I mean. When America picked up the gauntlet, an active conscience jerked me from a tuneful life and drove me out to war—for whether men are driven by conscience, or a government draft board, makes no difference in the effect upon those who come through. Time after time, for eighteen months, I made my regular trips into hell—into a hell more revolting than mid-Victorian evangelists ever pictured to spellbound, quaking sinners. Never in this world had there been a parallel to the naked dangers and nauseous discomforts of that western front; never so prolonged an agony of head-splitting noises, lacerations of human flesh, smells that turned the body sick, blasphemies that made the soul grow hard, frenzied efforts to kill, and above all a spirit, fanatical, that urged each man to bear more, kill more, because he was a Crusader for the right.

Into this red crucible I had plunged, and now emerged—remolded. In one brief year and a half I had lived my life, dreamed the undreamable, accomplished the unaccomplishable. Much had gone from me, yet much had come—and it was this which had come that distorted my vision of future days; making them drab, making my fellows who had not taken the plunge seem purposeless and immature. Either they were out of tune, or I was—and I thought, of course, that they were. What freshness could I bring to an existence of peace when my gears would not mesh with its humdrum machinery!

My mother, ever quick to detect the workings of my mind as well as the variations of my body, had noticed these changes when I disembarked the previous week, and had become obsessed with the idea that I stood tottering on the brink of abysmal wretchedness. So, while I was marking time the few days at camp until the hour of demobilization, she summoned into hasty conference my father, our family doctor, and the select near relatives whose advice was a matter of habit rather than value, to devise means of leading me out of myself.

This, I afterward learned, had been a weighty conference, resulting in the conclusion that I must have complete rest and diversion. But as my more recent letters home had expressed a determination to rush headlong into business—as a sort of fatuous panacea for jumpy nerves, no doubt—and since the conferees possessed an intimate knowledge of the mulish streak that coursed through my blood, their plans were laid behind my back with the greatest secrecy. Therefore, when entering the library this last night in December and hurrying to my mother's arms, I had no suspicion that I was being drawn into a very agreeable trap, gilded by my father's abundant generosity.

We sat late after dinner. Somewhere in the hall Bilkins hovered with glasses and tray to be on hand when the whistles began their screaming. In twenty years he had not omitted this New Year's Eve ceremony.

"Your wound never troubles you?" my mother asked, her solicitation over a scratch I had received ten months before not disguising a light of pride that charmed me.

"I've forgotten it, Mater. Never amounted to anything."

"Still, you did leave some blood on French soil," Dad spoke up, for this conceit appealed to him.

"Enough to grow an ugly rose, perhaps," I admitted.

"I'll bet you grew pretty ones on the cheeks of those French girls," he chuckled.

"Pretty ones don't grow any more, on cheeks or anywhere else," I doggedly replied. "Materialism's the keynote now—that's why I'm going back to work, at once."

"Oh," the Mater laughed, "don't think of your father's stupid office, yet!"

"There's nothing left to think of," I grumbled.

"Isn't there?" he exclaimed. "What'd you say if Gates has the yacht in commission, and you take a run down to Miami——"

"Or open the cottage, if you'd rather," she excitedly interrupted him. "I hadn't intended leaving New York this winter, but will chaperon a house party if you like!"

"Fiddlesticks! Cruise, by all means," he spoke with good-natured emphasis. "Get another fellow, and go after adventures and romances and that kind of thing! Go after 'em hammer and tongs! By George, that's what I'd do if I were a boy, and had the chance!"

They waited, rather expectantly.

"Cruising's all right," I said, without enthusiasm. "But it's a waste of time to go after romance and adventure. They died with the war."

"Ho!—they did, did they?" he laughed in mock derision. "What's become of your imagination—your vaporings? You used to be full of it!" And the Mater supported him by exclaiming:

"Why, Jack Bronx! And I used to call you my Pantheist! Don't tell me your second sight for discovering the beautiful in things has failed you!"

"It got put out by mustard gas, maybe," I murmured, remembering with bitterness some of the fellows who had been with me.

What was romance here to the colorful, high-tensioned thing I had seen in devastated areas where loves of all gradations were torn and scattered and trampled into the earth like chaff! Fretfully I told them this.

They exchanged glances, yet she continued in coaxing vein:

"You're such a big baby to've been such a big soldier! Don't you know that romance is always just over the hill, hand in hand with adventure—both lonely for someone to play with? Wars can't kill them! It's after wars, when a nation is wounded, that they become priceless!"

"By George, that's right," Dad cried. "Come to think of it, that's exactly right! And Gates has the same crew of six—men you've always known! Even that rascal, Pete, cooks better 'n ever! The Whim, you can't deny, is the smartest ninety-six foot schooner yacht that sails! I say again that if I had the chance I'd turn her free on whatever magic course the wings of the wind would take her! That I would—by George!"

And there was a note of deep appeal in the Mater's voice as she asked:

"Why not get that boy you wrote so much about—Tommy what's-his-name, the Southerner? I like him!"

This plan, which I now saw had been so carefully prepared—fruit of the secret conference—was but one in the million or so of others throughout America nurtured and matured by the brave army of fathers, mothers, wives, sisters, daughters, who stayed at home and gave their all, waiting with alternate hopes and fears, looking with prayerful eyes to the day that would bring a certain one back into their arms. What difference if some plans were elaborate and some as modest as a flower? Who would dare distinguish between the cruise on a private yacht and the cake endearingly made in a hot little kitchen for the husky lad just returned from overseas? Each was its own best expression of pride and love. Each said in its tenderest way: "Well done, my own!"

A lump came into my throat.

"It's rather decent of a fellow to have two such corking forbears," I murmured.

The Mater turned her gentle eyes to the fire, and Dad, clearing his throat in a blustering way—though he was not at all a blustering man—replied:

"Perhaps it's rather decent of us to have a son who—er, I mean, who—well, er——"

"A cruise hits me right," I exclaimed, hurriedly coming to his rescue, for neither of us wanted a scene. "And I'll wire Tommy Davis, Mater—the chap you mentioned. He's a corking fellow! I didn't write you how the battalion started calling him 'Rebel' till he closed up half a dozen eyes, did I? You see, in the beginning, when we were rookies, the sergeant had us up in formation to get our names, and when he came to Tommy that innocent drawled: 'Mr. Thomas Jefferson Davis, suh, of Loui'ville, Jefferson county, Kentucky, suh.' You could have heard a pin drop. The sergeant, as hard-boiled as they come, stood perfectly still and let a cold eye bore into him for half a minute, then gasped: 'Gawd! What a wicked little rebel!'"

They laughed.

"Why didn't you bring him home with you?"

"Same reason he couldn't take me home with him. There were people waiting, and turkey, and—but he won't want to go," I added. "He's crazy about a girl down there!"

"Fiddlesticks," my father chuckled. "Any normal fellow'll want to cruise! I'll wire him myself—this very night!"

Bilkins entered with the tray, wishing us a happy new year. Outside the whistles were beginning to blow. After we had pledged each other, and drunk to 1919, the Mater, a light of challenge in her eyes, looked at me and gave another toast:

"To a cruise and an adventure, Jack!"

"To romance," Dad cried, gallantly raising her fingers to his lips.

There was no use being a wet blanket, so with a laugh I said:

"To adventure and romance!—Mater, if they're still on earth I'll bring them home to you!"

I knew it was a very silly toast, but let it go to please them—for why disillusion those who believe in the actuality of nonexistence?