IV
Hartshorn, the Scranton man, offered Nat the upper bunk in the caboose car that night. And Nathan crawled in between blankets for the first time in weeks.
It was very easy to think, lying awake there in the dark. But Nathan did not want to think. He wanted to forget—forget quickly.
Yet he did think.
One great, vital fact stood out white-hot above all other facts in his consciousness—he was alive! He wasn’t out of the mêlée yet. But to date he was alive! A year had passed—gone like a terrific nightmare. And he was alive. Alive, alive, alive! He couldn’t get over that stunning realization.
There were days and even weeks in that year which were blurred. His mind had been so filled with impressions that it had absolutely refused to absorb any more. Oh, how picayune all his introspection, his love affairs, his family troubles, his Golgotha of small-town life had been back home, compared with life stripped stark naked as he had seen it out here! He seemed to be living now in another incarnation. He was not—he couldn’t be—the same fellow who had once lived in the Pine Street house with Milly, who had read poetry with old Caleb Gridley, who had drummed the trade from Wilkes-Barre up to Syracuse for the Thorne Mills, selling dozens and grosses of ladies’ and misses’ “thirty-sixes” and “forty-fours” and “spring-needle union suits with reënforced seats.”
How different life would appear when he got back—if he ever did get back!
What was his mother doing at this moment, Edith with her increasing family, Ted Thorne, myself? The boy’s mind grew sluggish; vague thoughts trooped helter-skelter across the filmy playground of his brain: Main Street, Paris—the Élite Bakery and Lunch Room with smoky ham-and-eggs frying at the back—the rumbling roll of the door in the box-shop that opened out upon the shipping platform—shaking down the furnace the last thing before going to bed in the Preston Hill home—Milly’s bake-bean-flavored pantry of a Sunday morning and most of the beans burned in the pot on top—how the March wind washed through the bare tree limbs the night he had sat in the dark and caught Milly with Plumb—Bernie Gridley’s colorless face bathed in blue cigarette smoke as her forked eyes impaled him that night in Chicago—a girl raised just above him in a hotel window, a girl with a clear-cut profile and calm eyes—queer, indeed, the things that stick in a man’s mind across the months and years!
He fell asleep. But he was alive!
He was headed out toward Vladivostok and when the war was ended, he would go back to—what?
His disordered imagination, twisted and wracked by the horrors he had witnessed, bathed him in icy sweat all night.
Milly tied hand and foot to a rail fence, a big cavalry officer in front of her with a saber—little Mary crying across a vast space, tiny hands blood-smeared—his father crawling along railroad tracks with eyes seared out, holding to the ties in hope of some one picking him up—his mother sitting in the midst of multitudinous household goods and wanting him to listen while she told him what the Germans had done! All night long!—horrible specters! handless, headless! Then along toward morning the girl of the hotel window, the girl of the calm eyes, leaning out of that window, reaching a hand down toward him, telling him not to mind—the fellow who had been her escort had gone—she was not his wife! She had never been his wife! Wouldn’t he find his way in at the door and finish the meal with her——
He awoke with some one’s hand upon his shoulder. A bleary-eyed face was close to a candle beside the bunk.
“For Heaven’s sake, Forge, old man—what’s the trouble? You’ve been groaning horribly the last five hours. It’s almost more than a fellow can stand, to hear you.”
“It’s all that coffee I drank,” apologized Nat. “I shouldn’t have taken so much. I’m sorry!”
But it was not the coffee.