V
There is always a morning.
Strange, unreal gray permeated the void. Rolling on billows of nausea, Nathan recovered groggy senses. He was freezing cold; he was being consumed by fire. Where was he? His mouth was dried leather. Where was he? He had no eyes; they had been burned out, or they were in the process of burning out right now. Where was he?
He moved and it agonized him. He uttered a piteous cry for no one to hear. He fell back. He moved again. He got up on an elbow,—the length of an arm. He fell back again. Where was he?
It came to him where he was. He was lost in Siberia. He must go on.
There are depths of endurance in the human spirit which no man can assay until he has a last great need for taking their fathoms.
Nathan got up—reeling. He did go on.
The quickened circulation of his blood caused by the exertion warmed his stiffened limbs somewhat. Joints bent more easily with use.
The events of the past night finally came to him in full terror. He remembered he might yet be only a mile or so from the tatterdemalion crew in that horror-village. He drove himself forward faster.
He drank mud water, foul with grit, to assuage a burning thirst.
The world was gray now. There was no longer need for groping. But it was a ghastly, grisly grayness. At any moment phantoms might loom in the mist. There was light enough to examine his arm. Mercifully he could not see how bad a wound the bullet had made, what had happened. It was too near his shoulder in the back.
“I’ve got to go on! I will go on!” he cried indomitably.
The fog showed no prospect of lifting. It was still a world without form and void. Dimly conscious in his direction, treading now on the firmer ground that bordered the steppe’s road, Nathan went on and away into nothing, nothing! Only fog!
Once he heard a horse approaching, slopping through the quag. Frenziedly he left the road, drew into the deeper mist, flattened himself to earth. Horse and rider passed him about a hundred feet to the east, a high-hatted rider on a dirty, creamy pony. Then quiet again—ethereal quiet—the journey—on and on—and on!
The fog of the world and of life was having a last great rubble with Nathan.
There could never be another fog like the fog of that night. There could never be another grayness quite like that last awful morning.
A couple of hours after dawn Nathan began drawing on raw nerve to make that journey. He had no prospect of finding food. He had no prospect of finding any one, even if he made the railroad. Trains over the railroad ran days apart now. He was far closer to death than he suspected.
But the blind instinct to live, to win an objective, drove him onward. And the road and the hills kept his footsteps true. Hour after hour, mile after mile,—still he staggered onward. Little six-inch steps at times now. Fog! Fog! Fog!
Had the sun risen? Could the sun be shining above?
The fog was luminous—different somehow. It seemed so.
“It’s got to lift sometime!” he cried brokenly. “The sun’s shining somewhere. The sun is always shining somewhere. I must find it. I must!”
How long he had been traveling since he awakened on damp ground and fought himself to his feet, he had no way of telling. Whether the sun had risen and was shining brightly above, he did not know. How close or how far he was to the railroad was equally vague. But Nathan, following that straight, muddy, northern road, came at last to a turn. The road bore off at right angles to the eastward.
He stopped, swaying dizzily.
“I didn’t come to any such corner last night,” he cried. “I know I didn’t! If I’m down in a valley—in a defile—somewhere around here are hills. I’m going straight northward and see if I can’t find hills. Then I’ll climb somehow to the top and try and get my direction—see if I can locate the railroad.”
It was not a decision to be taken lightly. So long as he kept to the road, that road must lead somewhere. If he lost that road by wandering away into the hills, he might never be able to find it again. Yet could he always follow it through lowlands, always stumble and stagger onward down in fog? He had to make that decision. And he did make that decision. He decided to climb upward on to the heights and trust to the sunlight above to set him aright.
The sunlight above to set him aright!
Anyhow, that climb started. For he found a hill almost directly ahead of that abrupt turn in the road to the eastward. That is why it had turned,—to avoid the grade.
It might not have been a serious climb for a normal man. But for a man exhausted and broken as Nathan was exhausted and broken, it was Golgotha in earnest. This was its only redeeming feature: as he dragged himself up, it became quickly evident that the world was growing brighter about him.
Yes, somewhere above the sun was shining, shining gloriously!
Up, up, up! On hands and knees now. The fog was thinning. He knew, because somehow the air felt warmer in those moments when his body was cold.
Because he was turned face downward, crawling tortuously, he did not see that sun when first it was discernible through the vapor.
He had to stop many times. When he started again he wondered in the back of his splitting head and grinding consciousness where he was finding the energy to make that ascent. At times he was so ill with vertigo that his stomach was racked; perhaps it was only the intuitive fear of falling and rolling back that long and sharp slope to the bottom—into the fog again!—that kept him conscious.
He was clawing upward a few feet now, then stopping half-hours, it seemed, for rest. His tongue was swollen. He could not shut his eyes for the agony. He tried to swallow and his throat refused to function. It came to him that in those self-commands to go on, the voice was not his own. It was no voice at all. He was making crazy, growling, guttural sounds.
And then—the sun!
Raising his eyes after one of his pauses for rest, hanging weirdly above him he beheld a ball of pale lemon, lambent in the heavens. Was it the sun? Could it be the sun?
Of course it was the sun! Nathan laughed at himself for the question. He did not realize his laugh was a crazy cackle.
Nathan climbed out of the fog.
He emerged from the fog-belt in the space of a hundred feet, left it below him entirely.
It was not quite the top. Not yet!
But when he had climbed out of that fog-belt into the warm, enervating sunshine, he saw the top.
Yes, he saw it, and he saw something else. The wounded, groping, clawing, climbing man raised tortured body from above the last mist-wreath, a hundred feet below the very summit of the grade. But as he raised blistered eyes toward that top—what was it?—an illusion? It must be! No! It was not an illusion!
There on the peak, swathed in the Sunlight Glorious, Nathan saw—a woman!
Queenly and tall, she was, Diana of the Morning! Calm eyes were gazing afar across limitless billows of night mist. Sunlight glinted on breeze-blown tresses. About her arrow-straight figure floated in beautiful folds a cape of blue with a scarlet lining. She was a white woman, and blue and scarlet cape was the field uniform of the American Red Cross, the Greatest Mother in the World!
Nathan was hideous with grime and filth. Blood was caked upon him. One arm hung useless. He had to pull himself that last hundred feet by inches. But when he knew it was not an illusion, not a mirage of glazed eyeballs and mangled imagination, he uttered a cry, a piteous cry, and held out his one good hand.
He held out his one good hand to Woman Beautiful on the Hill Top—Woman Beautiful at the Summit—who seemed waiting there for him to come up, though the last hundred feet he came sightless and staggering.
That was the one big time when Nathan held out his hand in agony of body and spirit to Womanhood and Womanhood responded as a ministering angel.
Woman Beautiful started at the cry, turned her gaze down, beheld him. Then——
Swiftly she started down the grade—to greet him—to reach him—to give him the final help he needed to realize attainment—to reach the pinnacle whereon is Victory.
Woman Beautiful came down. In her eyes was all Tenderness. On her face was Sympathy Infinite. She uttered a little cry of compassion. She caught his hand.
“You poor, poor fellow!” were the words that Nathan heard. “You’re hurt! Let me help you!”
Regardless of his broken body, no woman had ever spoken to Nathan in that tone before. Tears flooded across his glazed eyes then. Moisture welled in his throat. He wanted to speak, to answer. He could not.
Let her help him! No woman had ever said that to him, either.
“Lean on me!” came the invitation from her wealth of compassion and tenderness. “You’ve only a little way more to go. Make a little more effort. Then you can rest—up in the Sunlight!”
He could rest—up in the Sunlight!
The third miracle happened then. The broken man felt his arm being lifted across a woman’s shoulders. And suddenly by his side the resilient, supple strength of a woman sustained him. He felt a woman’s effort added to his own. He felt her almost lift him. He never knew that a woman could possess such strength. She spoke with compassion, she asked to help him, she placed his arm across her shoulder, she sustained him, she added her effort to his own, she lifted him, she gave him her strength—all she had to give, all that he needed; she literally bore him upward to the summit. He reached the Hill Top.
It was all Sunlight.
A thousand feet away was the railroad. A long train of a dozen white cars stood there, great carmine crosses emblazoned upon their sides, the glory insignia of the great Red Cross. The engine had been detached. Train crew and guard of soldiers were using that locomotive to shunt off piles of charred and smoldering wreckage—to clear the track—that the Red Cross on its mission of mercy might “carry on.”
Into the last car broke the woman in blue and scarlet. She interrupted the doctor in charge.
“Come quickly!” she cried. “A wounded soldier! I went off to that point of land to the south while they were clearing the track. As I stood here, a horribly hurt man crawled up the slope out of the valley fog. He’s stretched out on the ground in collapse. Come quickly!”
A stream of white-clad figures poured from the coaches, across the level plateau to the edge of the ravine. Two young surgeons bore a stretcher.
They picked up Nathan and laid him upon it. It was the work of a few moments to bear him back to the train.
“An American soldier! One of our boys!” cried Doctor Cleeve. “They probably attacked the train last night and captured him and he escaped from them!”
It was mid-afternoon when the Red Cross train was able to proceed again, into the deeper heart of Siberia, bearing Nathan backward. But he was among his friends—his countrymen—people of his blood and homeland.
He awoke in a white-iron berth, gauze bandages about his head, his left arm in a sling, bound tightly against his body. It was night. The great mercy-train was clicking steadily westward.
“Where is she?” he cried wildly, as he raised himself on his good elbow and addressed the young doctor, nodding by the window.
“Where is who?”
“The woman—who came down the hill—the one who helped me to the top!”
“She’s asleep! It’s the middle of the night. You’ve been unconscious and in delirium. Feeling better?”
“Who is she? Where have I seen her before? Or was she just an angel! And her face from my own imagination?”
“Miss Theddon found you, old man. She’s a new nurse, just out from the States. Joined us from Manila. You’re a lucky guy!”
“Theddon? Theddon? What’s her first name?”
“Madelaine, I think. Madelaine Theddon.”
“What part of the States does she come from?”
“Somewhere up in Massachusetts. I think I heard her talking with Doctor Cleeve about Springfield.”
“It wasn’t illusion!” cried Nathan then. “It was my girl of the Star!—My girl of the Window—out here—away out here—in Siberia! Oh, my God!”
“You know her, old man?”
“I saw her face once in a star,” affirmed Nathan. “I——”
Another doctor heard Nathan’s wild declamation and entered hastily.
“Delirium!” announced the first. “He thinks he knows Miss Theddon. Better give him another shot, Jack. He’s pretty near done for!”
But it was not delirium. How could they understand?