The Hills of Desire

by Richard Aumerle Maher

He felt like a boy who has been cheated of some wonderful promised adventure which he had been just about to begin. He was lonely, and he had been cheated, and if he tried to make the slightest move now somebody would come and begin to poke at him. Why couldn't they leave him alone? He wanted to cry.

And yet there was a sort of elusive contentment about this place—he did not know where or what the place was, and did not care—some kind of a pleasant memory, as though some one had been here. He thought he could dream here—if only they would not come poking at him. Maybe he had been dreaming. He could not remember.

There had once been a little white room somewhere. He could not remember where, but it did not matter. Augusta was in the little white room. In fact the little white room and Augusta were much the same thing. You could not seem to see one without the other.

Why should he think of that little white room and Augusta here? Had Augusta been here? Somehow it seemed like a place where Augusta had just been. That was a funny thing to think of, but that was true about Augusta. He remembered how she had only to be a moment in a room, or any place, and when she went away you could know that Augusta had been there. There was a blessedness, some sort of a happy sweetness, that always came with her and which you could feel after she was gone.

It was strange that he should feel that haunting, ethereal presence of her here. It had never deceived him before. Could it be coming here to mock him now? That would be too much!

If he could only get back to sleep before they came to poke at him, maybe they would leave him alone, and—maybe he could dream. He must have been dreaming of Augusta.

As a matter of fact, Augusta had been in that place, in that room but a moment or two before. Perhaps some tone of her voice had touched something in Wardwell's numb brain and had waked him slowly.

She had not seen him. There was no good reason why she should go near him or see him. He was just one of twenty-five or thirty variously wrapped bundles that had just come down from the field stations, each containing a man. So long as the man slept after the jolting and the fainting fatigue of the journey, he need not be disturbed.

So Augusta had gone on about her affairs. For she was a very busy woman in a very busy place.

Now she was slowly following a surgeon as he worked his way down a long line of cots, stopping at each one to inspect the bandages which had been loosened by a nurse going before, giving instruction for the washing of a wound where he found that necessary, placing a few swift stitches where the condition of a cut or an open wound demanded, probing sharply and directly with never an unnecessary touch, a man who did three days' work in every one of his days, and often as much more in one of his nights, with a steady temper and a will that procreated discipline and swift service in those about him. He was a middle sized man with Scotch gray eyes, a short gray mustache, very small feet, and excessively large hands whose bones had been overdrawn by hard, grubbing work in his youth on a Maine farm. He was short and blunt of word as most strong men will be when they are putting the best of their lives into the strokes of their day's work. But he was sensitive as a cat or a bird to anything unusual in the air about him. He repeated with unvarying distinctness the few clear orders at the end of each examination, assuming as bluntly as if Augusta had been an echo, or an adding machine, that she heard correctly, that she wrote the instructions properly and that she took each page from her pad and stuck it on the chart at the head of each bed. She was there for that purpose, just like the rest of his instruments. But there was something about this girl today that seemed to be speaking. It was not speaking to him particularly, but to all the world that had the sense to understand. There was a persistent breath of happiness about her that was as patent as sunshine yet as elusive as a perfume in a dream.