“It’s all right, Bertram; it’s all right!” she whispered. He returned no answer, even of a flickering eyelash. He lay still, inert, a great bulk that tugged at the muscles of her arms.
After a time, her frame adjusted itself to the position. Her perceptions, still keenly alive, told her that her doctor was working over a woman in the corner. Just as the train started, she saw him rise, wipe his hands on his handkerchief, and motion calmly to 247 two of the men. They lifted the woman. Eleanor realized all at once what the motion signified. They had taken her to join the dead in the baggage car.
Next to Bertram lay an old man, his head so wrapped in bandages that she could see only the tip of his grey beard. A middle-aged woman—Eleanor recognized her as a camper whom they had passed on the road but yesterday—knelt beside him, talking into his ear about his soul. “Do you lean on your Savior?” she whispered. A kind of passing impatience touched Eleanor. So much had her sympathetic spirit absorbed the feelings of these dying ones, that she resented this as an intrusion, an unwelcome distraction from the business of sloughing off the flesh.
A little sag of Bertram’s body, which alarmed her for a moment until she saw that the movement came from relaxation of her own arms, called her back to responsibility. The realization that it had called her back brought with it the amazing, shameful realization that it had ever wandered away.
Why—
From the moment when she took him into her arms, she had never thought of him as 248 her dying lover—never as her lover at all!
A man in extremis, a thing so beaten and suffering that she called for it on her Christ—he was all that, in common with the other beaten and battered and senseless wrecks about them. But the feeling that he was her own, about to go from her, had never entered her heart. She was ashamed while she thought of it; but it persisted. Not hers? Why, she had suffered him to kiss her only yesterday! Must she think of such things with a life to save?
Now, her body was giving way with weariness; it seemed that she could hold him no longer. She nodded to Judge Tiffany, therefore; the old man rose and gently took her burden from her. She sank back on the empty seat. When the faintness of fatigue had passed, she fixed her eyes on the still face of him who had been her lover.
Why was it? The clear-cut profile, so refined and beautiful since suffering gave it the final touch, had thrilled her only yesterday and through a succession of yesterdays. It had no power to thrill her now. She tried to put back this unworthy thought, but it persisted. In spite of pity and all decency of 249 the heart, that outer self of hers kept saying it to her like an audible voice. Were he to die now, in her arms, she should work and weep and pray over his passing—but only as she would work and weep and pray over that alien old man who lay beside him, that woman whom they had just carried away.
The Judge was flagging. He glanced wearily over his shoulder, as though he hesitated to ask for relief. She rose; and without a word she took his place. And now, as she knelt with Bertram’s slight yet heavy breathing in her ear, her thoughts became uncontrollable nightmare—scattered visions and memories of old horrors, as when she saw her father drunk on the pavement; a multitude of those little shames which linger so long. One incident which was not quite a shame thrust itself forward most insistently of all. It was that episode under the bay tree, when she was only a little girl. Why did that memory start to the surface those tears which had been falling so long within? Her weeping seemed to lift her to a tremendous height of perception, as though that outer self had flowed in upon her.