Fate Knocks at the Door. Will Levington Comfort

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СКАЧАТЬ yearnings, the recent fights. Cairns was enthralled and mystified. Bedient did not seem to hope for great things in a worldly way, while the correspondent was driven daily by ambition and its self-dreams. Life apparently had shown this cook day by day what was wisest and easiest to do—the ways of little resistance. He appeared content to go on so; and this challenged Cairns to explain what he meant to do with the next few years. Bedient heard this with fine interest, but no quickening. Cairns was insatiable for details of a life that had been spent in Asia and upon ships of the Eastern seas. Everything that Bedient said had a shining exterior of mystery to the American. His vague memories of New York; the water-fronts that had since called his steps; different ships and captains; the men about him, Healy and the packers; his entire detachment from relatives, and his easy familiarity with the great unhasting years—all these formed into a luminous envelope, containing the new friend.

      "I was always fed somehow," Bedient whispered, as he told about the dim little lad that was himself. "There was always some one good to me. I 'member one old sailor with rings in his ears——"

      The David Cairns of twenty likewise gave all gladly. Queerly enough, he found the other especially fascinated in anything he told of his mother and sisters, and the life at home in New York, made easy by the infinite little cushions of wealth and culture. A youth eight months away on his first campaign can talk with power on these matters. Here Cairns was wonderful and authoritative and elect to Bedient—particularly in the possession of a living, breathing Mother. This filled the cup of dreams in a way that the dominant exterior matters of the young correspondent's mind—newspaper beats, New York honors, great war stories, and a writer's name—could never have done. Bedient was clearly an inveterate idealist. His dreams were strangely lustrous, but distant, not to be touched nor handled—an impersonal kind of dreaming. Cairns was not so astonished that the other had been of uncommon quality in the beginning, but that his life had not made him common was a miracle, no less.

      Elements of glory were in this life he had lived, but those who belonged to it, whom Cairns had observed heretofore, were thick-skinned; men of unlit consciousness and hardened hearts, gruelling companions to whom there was no deadly sin but physical cowardice, and only muscular virtues. Bedient was not of these, neither in body, mind nor memory, aspiration, language nor manner. And yet they believed in him, accepted him in a queer, tentative, subdued fashion; and he spoke to them warmly, and of them with affection. All this needed a deeper and more mellowed mind than Cairns' to comprehend; though it challenged him from the first moment in that swiftly-darkening night. "It's too good to be true," was his oft-recurring sentence. … Though apart, Bedient was not scoffed. Could it be that he was so finished as a cook, as a friend, as an indefatigable—so rhythmically superior, that the packers took no offense at his aloofness? Certainly, Bedient felt no necessity of impressing his values upon his companions, as do those who have come but a little way in culture.

      Somehow, Alphonso smelled of roses that night, as the two lay together in that little plaza, where the mules were picketed and the satisfied infantry slept. In the jungle (which seemed very close in the moonlight), bamboo stalks creaked soothingly and stroked each other in the soft night winds, and the zenith sky boiled with millions of white-hot worlds. … Are not the best dreams of this earth to be heard from two rare boys whispering in the night? They have not been frightened by their first real failure, and the latest, most delicate bloom of the race has not yet been brushed from their thoughts. Curled within their minds, like an endless scroll, are the marvellous scriptures of millenniums, and yet their brain-surfaces are fresh for earth's newest concept. … What are they whispering? Their voices falter with emotion over vague bits of dreaming. They ask no greater stimulus to fly to the uttermost bounds of their limitations—than each other and the night. Reason dawns upon their stammered expressions, and farther they fly—thrilling like young birds, when their wings for the first time catch the sustaining cushions of air. … These are the vessels of the future—seals yet unbroken.

THIRD CHAPTER

       Table of Contents

      RED PIGMENT OF SERVICE

      Bedient explained that he had come to the Philippines pleased with the thought of seeing his own people, the Americans. He realized that he was not seeing them at their best under martial law. The pair exchanged narratives of action. Cairns pictured his first time under fire, ending:

      " … First you see the smoke; then you hear the bullets—then the sound of the guns last——"

      "Yes, that's the order," said Bedient, who laughed softly, and presently was telling of a recent and terrible baptism of fire. The Pack-train had spurred to the rescue of a small party of sick and footsore, making their way to garrison.

      "Why that was the Pony Pack Massacre!" Cairns exclaimed. "I heard about it—one of the worst affairs we've had over here—and you saw it?"

      "I wish I hadn't," Bedient answered. "The little party of Americans were down when I first saw them. Six or seven of the sixteen were dead; nearly all the rest wounded. The natives had fired from three sides—and would have finished their work with knives, except for Thirteen. The American lieutenant in charge was clear-grained. He had been trying to withdraw toward the town and carry his wounded—think of that. There were not two others besides himself unscathed. I'll never forget him—striding up and down praying and cursing—his first fight, you know—and his boy's voice—'Be cock sure they're dead, fellows, before you leave 'em behind for the bolos! … For the love of God don't leave your bunkies behind for the butchers!'

      "In a half minute, I saw it all—what a thing for white men to be gathered for slaughter on a trail over here. The boys knew it—and fought horribly against it. … "

      Cairns started to say something about this, but the words didn't come quickly enough, and Bedient went on:

      "There is a picture of that day which always means war to me. The soldier was hit mortally just as I got to him, but didn't fall at once, as one does when the spine or brain is touched. As my hands went out to him, he got it again and lost his legs, as if they were shot from under. His body, you see, fell the length of his legs. This second bullet was a Remington slug that shattered his hip. He had a full canteen strung over his shoulder, infantry fashion. The bullet that dropped him sitting on the trail, had gone through this to his hip. The canteen was spurting water. Mind you, it was the other wound that was killing him. There he sat dying on the road. I felt like dying for him—felt that I couldn't bear it if it took long. He was in my arms—and the canteen was emptying itself through the bullet-holes. Then he seemed to hear the water flopping out on the sand, and wriggled around to look at his hip, and I heard him mutter thickly: 'Look—look at the b-bl-blood run!'"

      Cairns felt that his companion suffered in this telling—that behind the dark, the face close to his was deadly pale. He couldn't quite understand the depths of Bedient's horror. It was war. All America was behind it. One boy can't stand up against his nation. It was all very queer. He felt that Bedient had a crystal gameness, but here was the sensitiveness of a girl. Cairns thought of the heroes he had read of who were brave as a lion and gentle as a woman, and these memories helped him now to grasp his companion's point of view. … Hesitating, Bedient finished:

      "You know, to me all else was hushed when I felt that boy in my arms. It was like a shouting and laughing suddenly ceased—as when a company of boys discover that one of their playmates is terribly hurt. … I imagine it would be like that—the sudden silence and sickness. It was all so unnecessary. And that boy's mother—he should have been in her arms, not mine. Poor little chap, he was all pimpled from beans, which are poison to some people. He shouldn't have been hurt like that. … There was another who had needed but one shot. The Remington had gone СКАЧАТЬ