“Never thought I should step into the shoes of a great surgeon. They ought to pass me through to the front if everything else fails, don’t you think?”
The chief eyed her quizzically. “They’ll carry you as far as you’ll care to go and for as long as you’ll stand. What’s troubling me is what your man will say when he knows?”
“Who—Peter?” Sheila’s smile deepened. “He’ll understand; he’ll be glad. Something both of us will remember always, something big to share. Oh, I know it’s going to be life and death, heaven and hell, rolled into a minute, but I wouldn’t be missing this chance—” She broke off suddenly, and when she spoke again there was a great reverence in her voice. “I feel as the littlest angel might have felt if God had asked him to be at the Creation.”
“Rather different, this.” Griggs, the chief’s assistant, spoke. There were just the three of them in the ambulance.
“Not so very. It’s another big primal happening, the hurling together of elemental things and impulses and watching something more solid and lasting come out. A new heaven and a new earth.”
“What we see coming out won’t be so solid or so lasting. We may not be ourselves.” Griggs was a pessimist, a heroic one, with an eye ever keen for the grimmest and most disappointing in life and a courage to meet it squarely.
The chief’s glance brushed him on its way to the nurse; Griggs’s share of it was plainly commiserating. “And I say, blessed be those who shall inherit it. But, girl, this doesn’t settle the question of your man. I’ve had to duck orders a bit to bring you along. Women aren’t wanted at the front. He may hold it up stiff against me for it.”
“But I can help. Any woman who can stand it will be needed. They shouldn’t bar us out. That’s all Peter’ll think about. Don’t worry.”
There was no question in the girl’s mind as to the wisdom or right in her coming—or Peter’s verdict in the matter. He would not fuss over this plunge into danger any more than he had misunderstood her giving away her wedding back at the old San and coming over at the eleventh hour. The last words Peter had said when he left her for the front came back with absolute distinctness:
“Whatever happens, do what you think best, go where you feel you must go. Don’t bungle your instincts. I’d trust them next to God’s own.”