All the intervening weeks of shame and anguish and fury and strife and pathos, and the endless striving to forget, were as if by the magic of a letter made nothing but vain oblations.
"He loves me still!" she whispered, and pressed her breast with clenching hands, and laughed in wild exultance, and paced her room like a caged lioness.It was as if she had just awakened to the assurance she was beloved.That was the shibboleth--the cry by which she sounded the closed depths of her love and called to the stricken life of a woman's insatiate vanity.
Then she snatched up the letter, to scan it again, and, suddenly grasping the import of Glenn's request, she hurried to the telephone to find the number of the hospital in Bedford Park.A nurse informed her that visitors were received at certain hours and that any attention to disabled soldiers was most welcome.
Carley motored out there to find the hospital merely a long one-story frame structure, a barracks hastily thrown up for the care of invalided men of the service.The chauffeur informed her that it had been used for that purpose during the training period of the army, and later when injured soldiers began to arrive from France.
A nurse admitted Carley into a small bare anteroom.Carley made known her errand.
"I'm glad it's Rust you want to see," replied the nurse."Some of these boys are going to die.And some will be worse off if they live.But Rust may get well if he'll only behave.You are a relative--or friend?""I don't know him," answered Carley."But I have a friend who was with him in France."The nurse led Carley into a long narrow room with a line of single beds down each side, a stove at each end, and a few chairs.Each bed appeared to have an occupant and those nearest Carley lay singularly quiet.At the far end of the room were soldiers on crutches, wearing bandages on their beads, carrying their arms in slings.Their merry voices contrasted discordantly with their sad appearance.
Presently Carley stood beside a bed and looked down upon a gaunt, haggard young man who lay propped up on pillows.
"Rust--a lady to see you," announced the nurse.
Carley had difficulty in introducing herself.Had Glenn ever looked like this? What a face! It's healed scar only emphasized the pallor and furrows of pain that assuredly came from present wounds.He had unnaturally bright dark eyes, and a flush of fever in his hollow cheeks.
"How do!" he said, with a wan smile."Who're you?""I'm Glenn Kilbourne's fiancee," she replied, holding out her hand.
"Say, I ought to've known you," he said, eagerly, and a warmth of light changed the gray shade of his face."You're the girl Carley! You're almost like my--my own girl.By golly! You're some looker! It was good of you to come.Tell me about Glenn."Carley took the chair brought by the nurse, and pulling it close to the bed, she smiled down upon him and said: "I'll be glad to tell you all Iknow--presently.But first you tell me about yourself.Are you in pain?
What is your trouble? You must let me do everything I can for you, and these other men."Carley spent a poignant and depth-stirring hour at the bedside of Glenn's comrade.At last she learned from loyal lips the nature of Glenn Kil bourne's service to his country.How Carley clasped to her sore heart The praise of the man she loved--the simple proofs of his noble disregard Of self! Rust said little about his own service to country or to comrade.
But Carley saw enough in his face.He had been like Glenn.By these two Carley grasped the compelling truth of the spirit and sacrifice of the legion of boys who had upheld American traditions.Their children and their children's children, as the years rolled by into the future, would hold their heads higher and prouder.Some things could never die in the hearts and the blood of a race.These boys, and the girls who had the supreme glory of being loved by them, must be the ones to revive the Americanism of their forefathers.Nature and God would take care of the slackers, the cowards who cloaked their shame with bland excuses of home service, of disability, and of dependence.
Carley saw two forces in life--the destructive and constructive.On the one side greed, selfishness, materialism: on the other generosity, sacrifice, and idealism.Which of them builded for the future? She saw men as wolves, sharks, snakes, vermin, and opposed to them men as lions and eagles.She saw women who did not inspire men to fare forth to seek, to imagine, to dream, to hope, to work, to fight.She began to have a glimmering of what a woman might be.
That night she wrote swiftly and feverishly, page after page, to Glenn, only to destroy what she had written.She could not keep her heart out of her words, nor a hint of what was becoming a sleepless and eternal regret.
She wrote until a late hour, and at last composed a letter she knew did not ring true, so stilted and restrained was it in all passages save those concerning news of Glenn's comrade and of her own friends."I'll never-never write him again," she averred with stiff lips, and next moment could have laughed in mockery at the bitter truth.If she had ever had any courage, Glenn's letter had destroyed it.But had it not been a kind of selfish, false courage, roused to hide her hurt, to save her own future?
Courage should have a thought of others.Yet shamed one moment at the consciousness she would write Glenn again and again, and exultant the next with the clamouring love, she seemed to have climbed beyond the self that had striven to forget.She would remember and think though she died of longing.
Carley, like a drowning woman, caught at straws.What a relief and joy to give up that endless nagging at her mind! For months she had kept ceaselessly active, by associations which were of no help to her and which did not make her happy, in her determination to forget.Suddenly then she gave up to remembrance.She would cease trying to get over her love for Glenn, and think of him and dream about him as much as memory dictated.
