Scribner's Magazine/Volume 42/Number 1/Those That Wait

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

 

THOSE THAT WAIT

 

By Mary Roberts Rinehart

 

AS the last call of the guard died away, Phillips roused himself from the campchair where he had been dozing, his head against the upright of the tent, and looked guiltily down the alley of gray canvas, with its darker shadows, horizontal, motionless. The Wardmaster yawned; then he got up, with his hands to his forehead. His head was throbbing, and the ground under his feet wavered so that he had to wind his arm around the upright for support.

Somewhere back in the ward there began the insistent tattoo of a tin cup on the side of a cot. Phillips prodded with his foot a figure in a blanket at his feet.

"Get up, Simpson," he said. "I'm all in. What's the matter with you? Wake up!"

The blanket twisted, stretched, and raised itself by degrees.

"What is it?" Simpson inquired drowsily, showing a strong inclination to fold up on the ground again. The tin cup began again, louder.

"A night attack by the enemy!" Phillips retorted with fine sarcasm. "Take some water back to the Swede, and then get me a thermometer, will you? Somebody chewed mine up to-day."

With the slender glass tube in his hand, however, the Wardmaster hesitated—then he gave it back.

"What's the use?" he said listlessly. "I'd get a little more quinine to-morrow—that's all. Lord, isn't it hot!"

The nurse looked at his youthful Sergeant understandingly.

"It's the flannel," he said. "I was dreamin' of sheets, oceans of 'em. I was buried in 'em—cool, slippery ones." He shook his blanket out and examined it carefully by the light of the lantern. "Something's been bitin' me all night," he growled. "Just when I think I've got it, it jumps, damn it."

He rolled himself in the gray blanket and flopped down again, but he did not go to sleep at once. After a couple of uneasy turns he raised himself on his elbow and looked along the three tents which formed the long tunnel-like ward.

"Think of it," he grumbled, "hospitals at home achin' to take 'em, and coddle 'em, and feed 'em with decent grub. And they're stuck here in a swamp, with a cigarette-smokin' kid in charge of the kitchen, and two tin basins and a bottle of insect powder by way of equipment! God—give me a bullet, every time!"

He dropped back in a drowsy heap and was almost instantly asleep; beneath the blanket his feet stuck out, covered with socks through which his naked toes protruded.

The Wardmaster dozed again. He was roused by something rubbing against his foot. To his fever-stirred brain the intruder loomed large and menacing, but it resolved itself into a cat, as lean, as wretched as himself. He got up with difficulty, and pouring some milk out of a pitcher into a cup, set it on the ground.

"I warn you, Thomas," he said gravely, "the bacillus coli communis is floating around: that milk's probably full of it. If you get any, the papers will call it malaria." The cat lapped hungrily, curling his tail around him and folding his paws after the manner of cats. A little air drifted along the ground, lifting the flaps of the tents, and the sharp shadows became hazy with the night mist. The cat slept, gorged, at Phillips's feet, undisturbed by the call of the guard.

"Post number one: one o'clock." "Post number two: one o'clock, and all's well."

Phillips was not asleep. He slid his finger along his wrist and smiled grimly as he felt the artery leap under it. Then, partly because he was suffocating, partly because he had got in the habit of doing it, he went out into the night and stood for a moment staring at a group of tents that loomed misty white above the ground fog. And in his face there was something not pleasant to see.

When he went back, a man was sitting on the side of the nearest cot. He was testing his strength, putting his feet down and raising himself an inch or two with his hands. Evidently he was satisfied, for he called Phillips over.

"Let me get up in that chair, Sergeant," he pleaded in a whisper. "I can't sleep, and I can kick Simpson if he's needed. You take this bed: you'd better lie down before you fall down."

Without protest Phillips dropped on the cot and stretched himself luxuriously. The convalescent wrapped his blanket around his knees and put his feet on the end of the bed.

"Going to sleep?" he asked cautiously.

"No."

"Look here, Phillips—you'll have to start home to-morrow if you're going at all. I've been watching you, and—you're sick. I'll be blamed if I think it's malaria either."

"Typhoid," Phillips said laconically.

"Furlough come yet?"

"No."

"What's the matter," asked the other man. "I thought—aren't you going to get it?"

Phillips clenched his hands under the blanket.

"The application never went in," he said quietly. "I asked the clerk about it, and—he said he tore it up, under orders, and threw it away."

The man in the chair sat upright. "Why, it's murder! That's what it is." He bit his lip over the slip, but the other man did not notice. He was arguing—with himself.

"We're short of men, Collins," he was saying. "There's nobody to put here—and of course—he couldn't know. It may come yet."

"Like hell it may," Collins muttered. "As for the Major not knowing, it's his business to know. Do you live with your folks? Want me to write to them?"

"With my mother. No. No use alarming her."

"Father dead?"

"No." There was a note of finality that stopped further questioning, and Collins desisted.

Phillips lay there for a thousand years, looking up at the streaked canvas over his head, seeing strange processions of people he had known, watching the tent roof recede miles away, and then come back and drop on his face and try to smother him. And one of the professors from his medical college came again and again, and sat on the foot of the cot and asked him the rise and fall and tributaries of the ilio-hypogastric nerve.

When a century had passed, he wakened suddenly and sat up. The floor slipped back as he put his feet down, but once erect he could walk, treading gingerly so as not to arouse the hammering devils in his head.

"How long was I asleep?" he demanded irritably.

"Twenty minutes," Collins said. "Say, the boy that came yesterday—first Wisconsin—is pretty bad. Temperature, one-naught-six. Simpson says are you going to send for Shields?"

"No good. Shields is laid up."

"Try for the Major then."

But Phillips turned on him bitterly.

"We'll let the Major sleep," he snarled.

He got a basin of cold water, and sponged the sick boy carefully. Over and over, with long, downward strokes, on his knees, because he couldn't stoop, he worked away, losing count of time, but always wetting the sponge and keeping on. Once or twice he squeezed it over his own head and the water ran down in little trickles of coolness under his shirt. When he finished, the boy was sleeping, and Phillips stumbled back to the cot. Collins was sitting there, holding the cat on his knee.

"Jove," he said, "I know what hell's like now—it's not furnace-hot and dry: it's hot—and damp—and muggy. How do you feel?"

"Rotten," Phillips said wearily.

"You said a funny thing in your sleep," Collins persisted, watching him. "You got up on your elbow and looked straight at me, and you said, 'All my life I have been taught to look up to you: that you were a great man. And they lied!'"

Phillips did not answer. He lay back on the cot and closed his eyes. And once again the figures crowded around.

 

••••••

 

It was Johnson, of the Ambulance Corps, who found him the next day, refusing to be undressed, and raving of a furlough that had torn itself into scraps. And when Major Armitage, on hospital inspection that day, came around, the sick man buried his face in his pillow and babbled. Johnson undressed him, bathed him, and sat by him for a while, cursing the kitchen which sent in soup filled with vegetables, and straining through a towel the little that Phillips would take.

"He's finished himself, all right," Simpson whimpered. "No sleep—rotten grub—and workin' twenty-four hours a day. And it ain't only that." He came close to Johnson and bent over. "Have you noticed about Armitage?" he asked. "Wasn't he talkin' about him? He was—all last night. Once he thought I was the Major, and he said, 'You've done worse than you knew. You've killed the man I thought you were.'"

"Delirium," Johnson scoffed. "What kind of sense does that make?"

"There's something you and I don't know, Lieutenant," Simpson persisted. "One night, a couple of weeks ago, when he looked pretty bad, I coaxed him to go out and walk around. When he didn't come back, I found him outside the Major's tent, in the shadow, with his arms folded, and a queer look in his face. I touched him twice before he knew I was there. It's been a queer business."

"Has the Major noticed? Does he know him?"

"Not that I know of. But for that matter, his own mother wouldn't recognize him."

A week later Johnson sought and found Captain Armour, the Surgeon. He was washing in a tin basin outside his tent, throwing the cold water over his bald head and puffing like a porpoise.

"The next time it rains," he was grumbling, "I am going to have a shower bath, if I smash every regulation on the slate. The idea of a two-hundred-pound man keeping clean on a pint of water ter in die! Phillips? What about Phillips?"

"He's very bad, sir," Johnson replied. "I wish you could come over to-night and look at him. He's weak, and wearing himself out with delirium."

"He's a good boy, Phillips is," the Surgeon spoke through his towel. "I'll come over and bring Major Armitage if I can get him."

Through the long days Phillips had lain on the end cot; when ice was plentiful sometimes a cup of small pieces was put on the ground beside him, and he learned to reach down and fumble for it. The coolness and moisture helped his crusted tongue and cracked lips. And twice a day somebody went over him with a sponge and cold water, and for ten glorious minutes he was rested, moist, sane. Then the fever devils came again, and things crawled around him, and the cot sometimes floated high in the air, and again was so close to the ground that he smelled the damp earth, like an open grave.

And always he held to a bit of worthless paper that Johnson had got from headquarters, which said that one Alden Phillips was entitled to ten days' furlough, and was useless now, of course, seeing that he was being given a furlough that stretched into eternity.

Captain Armour came that night and sat on the foot of the bed, and swore at the heat and the smell in the ward. And then he took a long breath and said that Phillips had been in his clinic at Philadelphia for a year, and it was too bad, too bad.

After a while he scribbled a line, and sent it to Major Armitage, in charge of the field hospital, and then he sat and waited, patting Phillips's hand now and then, and muttering under his breath.

"A little bit of nursing," he snarled, "a woman to fuss over them and make them comfortable, that's what they need here: it's the men that have never seen a battle that are dying in this war."

The heat was terrible. A lantern hung above the head of the cot, leaving Phillips's face in shadow and throwing out clear and distinct, the undress of the Surgeon. He had taken off his coat, showing a broken pair of suspenders and a flannel shirt open and turned in almost to the waist over his hairy chest.

All through the ward was a hustle of preparing for the night. The convalescents were shaking crumbs off their blankets and punching pillows for their helpless comrades: milk and water were being put around: Simpson, who was a hostler by nature as well as training, was tying down a delirious Texan much as he would a refractory horse, and in a far corner a colored soldier was singing under his breath. Some of the men took up the song, humming it with shaky, unpractised voices.

There was an instant silence when Major Armitage came in. The privates saluted and slunk to their cots—the Surgeon started to fasten his shirt and thought better of it. Only the song went on, low, deep, fervent.

"Lead, kindly Light, amid th' encircling glo-o-m,
Lead Thou me on!"...

the men sang softly.

The Major nodded to the Surgeon, and stood for a moment looking down at the prostrate boy. "What's his name?" he asked.

"Phillips: Ambulance Corps, Fourth Pennsylvania."

"Sent word to his home?" curtly.

"To his mother—yesterday, sir," Johnson replied.

"It's Iowa," the Surgeon supplemented. "She won't get here for three days. The boy's been sick for two weeks. I don't know why he didn't get away from this plague spot while he could."

Simpson brought a chair and Major Armitage sat down beside the cot. He took the galloping pulse, and being a careful man, he took it for two minutes instead of one. With the touch of his cool hands the muttering ceased; Phillips, who had been staring at the tent roof, suddenly turned his head and looked at Armitage; then he jerked his hand away.

"You!" he said thickly, for his tongue was hard and dry. "Who—sent for you?"

The Major looked at the Surgeon.

"There's no delirium there, Doctor," he said. "What's he getting?"

"Nothing that he ought to have," the Surgeon grumbled. "I tell you, Major——"

But the sick man was suddenly laboring under violent excitement. He put out a bony finger and tried to touch the Major, but his shaking muscles lacked direction, and the arm dropped.

"They always come and sit beside me," he wailed, "and when I want to tell them things, they're not there. You—" he raised himself on one bony elbow and stared in the Major's eyes—"don't go yet. Wait—till I tell you. You—tore up the furlough! It was life or death to me and you—gave me death. And—when you come and sit beside me—and I want to choke you—I can't because—you know why!"

The silence was suddenly terrible. Major Armitage sat immovable; the boy's accusing eyes held him.

"All my life," the husky voice went on—"all my life, I've been taught to think of you as—one apart, a great man, a good man: I was—to think nothing evil of you—I was to respect you, to try—to be like—you. Why, it's a joke: why don't you laugh? The other faces always grin! Why don't you?"

The Major tried to speak, but no words came. A couple of privates stopped to listen and moved on, warned by a glare from the Surgeon.

"I read—everything—I could find—about you; I ordered—my life—as I thought would please you— And when the—war came, and you went, I—I went too, like a little puppy trailing—at your heels. I couldn't stay at home—any more—than you could! It—was—in—the blood. Why don't you laugh?"

The Major got up suddenly and stared down at the boy; then with shaking fingers he tried to take the lantern from its hook. From the far corner of the ward the droning song floated down to them, plaintive, appealing:

"The night is dark, and I am far from ho-ome,
Lead Thou me on.'"

With the lantern in his hand, the Major hesitated. Then he turned it full on the boy's face, with its sunken, tortured eyes.

The boy's strength was going. He was swaying on his bony elbow; then he dropped back and lay quiet. When he moved again it was to say that he could make better soup than that out of an old shoe, and he pushed away an imaginary bowl. After a while, he seemed to sleep, only his fingers picked, picked at the blanket.

The Surgeon looked into the Major's face, and from there to the gaping ears of the ward, the smell, the noise, the moist heat that sapped the soul.

"Get the cot out into the air," he said, and when it had been done, he took the Major's arm and led him, stumbling, to where it had been put on the grass in the cool night, with only a candle on a box for light. It threw into relief, above the blanket, Phillips's impassive white face, and the Major's suddenly aged one. From the foot of the cot the Surgeon gave medicine now and then, and could think of no comfort—the body being his province, not the soul.

From far off across the camp there rose a distant hubbub of noise. It spread, grew, came close and resolved itself into the clamor of forty thousand throats. Like waves breaking on the sand the sound approached, receded, crept on again. It beat against the canvas walls of the hospital, and echoed back from the hills. The camp was suddenly alive; torches, candles, lanterns flashed up, a twisting, leaping mass of lights, and far across the camp a band was playing "Dixie." Nearby a South Carolina regiment had taken up the noise. "Yi-i-i-i," they rasped the night with the old rebel yell of triumph.

Simpson ran out to the nearest regiment and collided with an officer, who was too excited to damn him.

"I'm from the hospital, Lieutenant," he panted. "What—what's happened?"

"Spanish fleet sunk by Sampson at Santiago," the Lieutenant called back over his shoulder.

A Missouri regiment had formed line and was marching noisily through the camp, their lines growing constantly amid the throb of the drums and the cheers of the men. It was a riot of surcharged emotion, of unselfish pride in a victory in which they had had no part, in a war which spelled for them only inglorious hardship, this outburst in the Camp of Those Left Behind.

Somewhere, far off, the Brigadier-General was making a speech, incoherent, throbbing, joyous. He wore his uniform trousers and a pajama coat, and stood on the top of a barrel. Simpson could not wait to hear. He scuttled back to the hospital, and feeble cheers followed his announcement, made in a voice which cracked with the tension in his throat.

Through it all, the Major, by Phillips's cot, did not move. Once or twice he looked out at the pandemonium, the relaxed discipline of the camp, but he was detached, far away. His mind was back in the days when this gaunt, dying young soldier was a youngster, and he had read him "The Man Without a Country," and had had to stop, with a lump in his own throat, while the boy had cried the hot tears of childhood. It was long ago, and now the boy was a soldier—and dying.

After a while the Surgeon came back and took up his vigil on the end of the cot.

"Thank the Good One above," he said huskily, "we've licked those damned Spaniards into a cocked hat."

The boy had stopped babbling and slept: the Major raised his head. It was evident that the doctor's voice had not penetrated to him, back in the years that were gone.

"When was—his mother sent for?"

"Yesterday."

"She cannot get here," he said simply, and fell back into his old position, his chin on his hands. When he looked up again, the noise was subsiding. The lights of the camp were paling before the dawn, and the candle had melted and run over in little wax stalactites.

"In case of—perforation, "he asked dully, "could you—operate?"

"Not here; nothing to do it with. If he was anywhere but in this forsaken swamp——"

The Major leaned over suddenly and gripped the doctor's shoulder. "I didn't know him. I haven't seen him since his mother took him away—long ago. Doctor, he's my boy!" he choked, giving way at last to the horror of the thing. "My God! He is my son, and I tore up his furlough, Doctor. I gave him Death instead of Life. Man, is there nothing I can do? Have I got to sit here and let him die?"

The doctor had stripped the flannel shirt from the boy's skinny shoulder and was holding the thermometer under his arm. When he took it out and looked at it he leaned over and touched the Major's prostrate figure.

"Look here," he said bluntly, "you haven't killed him yet, but you will, with a conviction like that. Look at this thermometer; look at that sleep: I tell you he's better. He'll live to—to rag you about that furlough yet."

The doctor's eyes were misty. In the faint dawn he looked like an unshaven, shining-crowned saint.

The boy on the cot opened his eyes slowly. The racked face of the Major was bending over him, the Major's hand held his. Slowly the despair, the disillusion of the last few weeks died out of his eyes, and he slept again.

Over the tops of the tents came a misty shaft of sunlight—a promise of the glory of the day, and clear and rousing, over the drowsy camp came the reveille. Somewhere near by a regimental band broke into "The Star-Spangled Banner," its notes stirring anew the holy fire in the breasts of Those Left Behind, voicing for them their cause, their passive battles, their potentialities, their country.