IX
There were moments on the voyage, in the training area in Flanders, even at the front, when he was sorry he had tried to take something of Sylvia with him to battle; for, as it was, he had of her nothing whatever except a wish that she should never see him again. There was a deep irony, consequently, in his official relations with her brother, for it was Lambert who saluted him, who addressed him perpetually as "sir," who wanted to know if the major would approve of this, that, or the other. It was grotesque. He wanted to cry aloud against this necessary servility of a man whose sister couldn't abide the inferiority of its object.
And he hated war, its waste, its bad management, its discomforts, its dangers. Was it really true he had involved himself in this filth because of Sylvia? Then that was funny. By gad, he would see her again! But he watched his chances dwindle.
While the battalion was in reserve in Lorraine Lambert and he ran into Dalrymple at the officers' club beneath division headquarters in Baccarat. George saw him first.
"The intrepid warrior takes his ease," he muttered.
Dalrymple left three staff men he was with and hurried across the room.
"New York must be a lonesome place," he said. "Everybody here. Had a letter from Sylvia, Lambert."
Why should she write to him? Far from women's eyes he was back at it. One of the staff men, in fact, wandered over and whispered to George.
"Either you chaps from the trains? Somebody ought to take him to his billet. General or chief-of-staff might drift through. Believe he'd slap 'em on the shoulder."
"Not a bad idea," George said, contemptuously.
Dalrymple didn't even try to be cordial to him, knowing George wasn't likely to make trouble as long as they were in France. Lambert took care of him, steered him home, and a few days later told George with surprised laughter that the man had been transferred to a showy and perfectly safe job at G.H.Q.
"Papa, and mama, and Washington!" Lambert laughed.
"Splendid thing for the war," George sneered.
But he raved with Lambert when Goodhue was snatched away by a general who chose his aides for their names and social attainments.
"Spirit's all through the army," Goodhue complained, bitterly. "Why doesn't it occur to them to get the right men for the right places?"
He sighed.
"Suppose we'll get through somehow, but there'll be too much mourning sold at home."
All along that had been in George's mind, and, in his small way, he did what he could, studying minutely methods of accomplishing his missions at the minimum cost to his battalion; but on the Vesle he grew discouraged, seeing his men fall not to rise; or to be lifted to a stretcher; or to scramble up and stagger back swathed with first-aid rolls, dodging shells and machine-gun spirts; or, and in some ways that was hardest of all to watch, to be led by some bandaged ones, blinded and vomiting from gas.
He had no consecutive sleep. He never got his clothes off. He snatched food from a tin can. He suffered from the universal dysentery. He was under constant fire. He lay in shallow funk holes, conferring with his company and platoon commanders. At best he sat in the cellar of a smashed house, poring, by the light of a candle, over maps and complicated orders. Most of the time he wore a gas mask which had the advantage, however, of shutting out the stifling odour of decay. He never had time to find out if he was afraid. He reached a blessed state of indifference where getting hit appeared an inevitable and restful prospect.
Driggs Wandel arrived surprisingly on the day the Germans were falling back to the Aisne, at a moment when most of the artillery fire was coming from the American side, when it was possible to sit on a sunny bank outside the battalion dugout breathing only stale souvenirs of last night's gas shells.
"Bon jour, most powerful and disreputable of majors!"
George held out his hand.
"Bring any chocolate, Driggs? Sit down, you idiot. Jerry's never seen such a nice new uniform."
Suddenly he lost his temper. Why the devil couldn't he get some pleasure out of this extraordinary reunion? Why did he have to greet Wandel as if he had seen him daily since their parting more than three years ago on a dusky pier in New York? He had heard that Wandel, with the declaration of war, had left the ambulance for a commission in the field artillery. He saw him now wearing the insignia of a general staff major.
"Just attached to your corps headquarters," Wandel said. "Didn't want the job, would rather have been a fighting man with my pretty guns. Suppose some fool of a friend of the family brought the usual influence without consulting me."
"Glad to see you, Driggs," George muttered, "although I don't seem able to tell you so. How did you get here?"
"Guide from regimental headquarters. Wanted to see how the submerged heroes live. Nasty, noisy, smelly spot to be heroic in."
"A picnic to-day."
"I've always suspected," Wandel said, "that picnics were unhealthy."
"Better have come," George grinned, "any other day we've been here the past few weeks."
Wandel laughed.
"Don't think I didn't pick my day. The general staff takes no unnecessary risks. Tell me, my George, when did you shave last? When did you wash your pretty face last? When did you take your swank clothes off last?"
"I think when I was a very little boy," George sighed.
Wandel became abruptly serious, turned so, perhaps, by a large shell fragment, still warm, which he had picked up. As he fingered it he stared at George.
"I know," George said, "that I point a moral, but even little boys would be glad to be made clean if they got like this. Don't rub it in."
"To the contrary," Wandel said, thoughtfully, "I'm going back over a lot of years. I'm remembering how that most extraordinary man, Freshman George Morton, looked. I'm thinking that I've always been right about you."
The warm sun, the diminution of racket, this sudden companionship, had drawn George a little from his indifferent, half-dazed condition. He, too, could look back, and without discomfort. On the Vesle it was only death that counted. Birth didn't amount to a hill of beans, or money, or education, except in that it made a man an officer. So George answered frankly:
"All along you've guessed a lot about me, Driggs."
"Known, George."
"Would you mind telling me how?"
"It would be a pleasure to point out to you," Wandel drawled, "that a lot of people aren't half as big fools as you've credited them with being. You looked a little what you were at first. You've probably forgotten that when you matriculated you put down a place of residence, a record easily available for one who saw, as I did, means of using you. Even a fool could have guessed something was up the night Betty was good enough to make herself a part of the beau monde. I gathered a lot from Lambert then."
"Yet," George said, almost indifferently, "you went on being a friend."
"Your political manager, George," Wandel corrected. "I'm not sure it would have gone much further if it hadn't been for Dicky."
George was thoroughly aroused at last.
"Did Dicky know?"
"Not mere facts," Wandel answered. "What difference did they make? But he could see what you had started from, how great the climb you were taking. That's why he liked and admired you, because of what you were, not because of what you wanted people to think you were. That's really what first attracted me to you, and it amused me to see you fancying you were getting away with so much more than you really were."
"Extraordinary!" George managed. "Then the heights are not so well guarded?"
"Ah, yes—guarded," Wandel said, "but not against great men."
George kicked at the ground with his heel.
"Funny how unimportant it all seems here," he muttered.
It wasn't only the surroundings that made it seem unimportant; it was his remembrance of Sylvia who had known more than Wandel, more than anybody, yet had never opened the gate.
"You've taken all my conceit away," he went on. "Once it might have made me want to put myself out. Now I'm quite content to let Jerry do it."
Wandel's voice warmed, was less affected than George had ever heard it.
"What are you talking about? You've won a great victory. You should carry laurels on your brow. You've climbed to the top. You've defined for us all a possible socialism."
George smiled.
"A hell of a thing to talk about here! But tell that to Squibs, will you, little man, when you get back? We've had some rare battles over it."
Wandel hurried on.
"You've made yourself one of us, if it's any satisfaction. You're as good as the best of us—of the inheritors."
George folded his arms on his knees and bowed his head. Wandel's voice was startled.
"What's up?"
"Maybe I'm crying," George mumbled. "Ought to be, because I'm so filthy tired, and I know you're wrong, Driggs. I'm rotten inside. I haven't even started to climb."
But when he looked up there were no tears in his eyes, and his dirty face had altered with its old whimsical smile.
"Besides, it's enough to make me cry to know you wouldn't say all this unless you were certain I'm going to be killed."
"Hope not," Wandel laughed, "but picnics are full of germs. What's this?"
A grimy figure approached like a man fantastically imitating some animal. His route was devious as if he were perpetually dodging something that miraculously failed to materialize. He stopped, straightened reluctantly, and saluted George.
"Captain sent me on, sir. I've located Jerry opposite at——"
He rattled off some coordinates. George looked him over.
"How did you find that out?" he snapped.
"Ran across Jerry——"
The dirty young man recited jerkily and selflessly a story of fear and risks overcome, of cunning stealth, of passionate and promiscuous murder——
"Report back," George said.
When he had gone George called for his adjutant and turned to Wandel.
"Before anything happens to me," he said, "I'll recommend that dirty young assassin for a citation."
Wandel laughed in a satisfied way.
"I'm always right about you, great man. Don't you see that? Never think about your own citation——"
George stared at him, uncomprehending.
"Citation! A thousand citations for a bed!"
He watched Wandel uneasily when, at the heels of a guide, he dodged down the slope in search of Lambert, calling back:
"Don't swallow any germs."
"That's very fine, Driggs," he thought, "but why all that and not the rest? I'd give a good deal to guess what you know about me and Sylvia Planter."