Collected Works of Zane Grey, page 686
Well, he did all sorts of big things during the war. Was down several times with wounds. He liked to fight and he was a holy terror. We all thought he’d get medals and promotion. But he didn’t get either. These much-desired things did not always go where they were best deserved.
Rust is now lying in a hospital in Bedford Park. His letter is pretty blue, All he says about why he’s there is that he’s knocked out. But he wrote a heap about his girl. It seems he was in love with a girl in his home town — a pretty, big-eyed lass whose picture I’ve seen — and while he was overseas she married one of the chaps who got out of fighting. Evidently Rust is deeply hurt. He wrote: “I’d not care so . . . if she’d thrown me down to marry an old man or a boy who couldn’t have gone to war.” You see, Carley, service men feel queer about that sort of thing. It’s something we got over there, and none of us will ever outlive it. Now, the point of this is that I am asking you to go see Rust, and cheer him up, and do what you can for the poor devil. It’s a good deal to ask of you, I know, especially as Rust saw your picture many a time and knows you were my girl. But you needn’t tell him that you — we couldn’t make a go of it.
And, as I am writing this to you, I see no reason why I shouldn’t go on in behalf of myself.
The fact is, Carley, I miss writing to you more than I miss anything of my old life. I’ll bet you have a trunkful of letters from me — unless you’ve destroyed them. I’m not going to say how I miss your letters. But I will say you wrote the most charming and fascinating letters of anyone I ever knew, quite aside from any sentiment. You knew, of course, that I had no other girl correspondent. Well, I got along fairly well before you came West, but I’d be an awful liar if I denied I didn’t get lonely for you and your letters. It’s different now that you’ve been to Oak Creek. I’m alone most of the time and I dream a lot, and I’m afraid I see you here in my cabin, and along the brook, and under the pines, and riding Calico — which you came to do well — and on my hogpen fence — and, oh, everywhere! I don’t want you to think I’m down in the mouth, for I’m not. I’ll take my medicine. But, Carley, you spoiled me, and I miss hearing from you, and I don’t see why it wouldn’t be all right for you to send me a friendly letter occasionally.
It is autumn now. I wish you could see Arizona canyons in their gorgeous colors. We have had frost right along and the mornings are great. There’s a broad zigzag belt of gold halfway up the San Francisco peaks, and that is the aspen thickets taking on their fall coat. Here in the canyon you’d think there was blazing fire everywhere. The vines and the maples are red, scarlet, carmine, cerise, magenta, all the hues of flame. The oak leaves are turning russet gold, and the sycamores are yellow green. Up on the desert the other day I rode across a patch of asters, lilac and lavender, almost purple. I had to get off and pluck a handful. And then what do you think? I dug up the whole bunch, roots and all, and planted them on the sunny side of my cabin. I rather guess your love of flowers engendered this remarkable susceptibility in me.
I’m home early most every afternoon now, and I like the couple of hours loafing around. Guess it’s bad for me, though. You know I seldom hunt, and the trout in the pool here are so tame now they’ll almost eat out of my hand. I haven’t the heart to fish for them. The squirrels, too, have grown tame and friendly. There’s a red squirrel that climbs up on my table. And there’s a chipmunk who lives in my cabin and runs over my bed. I’ve a new pet — the little pig you christened Pinky. After he had the wonderful good fortune to be caressed and named by you I couldn’t think of letting him grow up in an ordinary piglike manner. So I fetched him home. My dog, Moze, was jealous at first and did not like this intrusion, but now they are good friends and sleep together. Flo has a kitten she’s going to give me, and then, as Hutter says, I’ll be “Jake.”
My occupation during these leisure hours perhaps would strike my old friends East as idle, silly, mawkish. But I believe you will understand me.
I have the pleasure of doing nothing, and of catching now and then a glimpse of supreme joy in the strange state of thinking nothing. Tennyson came close to this in his “Lotus Eaters.” Only to see — only to feel is enough!
Sprawled on the warm sweet pine needles, I breathe through them the breath of the earth and am somehow no longer lonely. I cannot, of course, see the sunset, but I watch for its coming on the eastern wall of the canyon. I see the shadow slowly creep up, driving the gold before it, until at last the canyon rim and pines are turned to golden fire. I watch the sailing eagles as they streak across the gold, and swoop up into the blue, and pass out of sight. I watch the golden flush fade to gray, and then, the canyon slowly fills with purple shadows. This hour of twilight is the silent and melancholy one. Seldom is there any sound save the soft rush of the water over the stones, and that seems to die away. For a moment, perhaps, I am Hiawatha alone in his forest home, or a more primitive savage, feeling the great, silent pulse of nature, happy in unconsciousness, like a beast of the wild. But only for an instant do I ever catch this fleeting state. Next I am Glenn Kilbourne of West Fork, doomed and haunted by memories of the past. The great looming walls then become no longer blank. They are vast pages of the history of my life, with its past and present, and, alas! its future. Everything time does is written on the stones. And my stream seems to murmur the sad and ceaseless flow of human life, with its music and its misery.
Then, descending from the sublime to the humdrum and necessary, I heave a sigh, and pull myself together, and go in to make biscuits and fry ham. But I should not forget to tell you that before I do go in, very often my looming, wonderful walls and crags weave in strange shadowy characters the beautiful and unforgettable face of Carley Burch!
I append what little news Oak Creek affords.
That blamed old bald eagle stole another of my pigs.
I am doing so well with my hog-raising that Hutter wants to come in with me, giving me an interest in his sheep.
It is rumored some one has bought the Deep Lake section I wanted for a ranch. I don’t know who. Hutter was rather noncommittal.
Charley, the herder, had one of his queer spells the other day, and swore to me he had a letter from you. He told the blamed lie with a sincere and placid eye, and even a smile of pride. Queer guy, that Charley!
Flo and Lee Stanton had another quarrel — the worst yet, Lee tells me. Flo asked a girl friend out from Flag and threw her in Lee’s way, so to speak, and when Lee retaliated by making love to the girl Flo got mad. Funny creatures, you girls! Flo rode with me from High Falls to West Fork, and never showed the slightest sign of trouble. In fact she was delightfully gay. She rode Calico, and beat me bad in a race.
Adios, Carley. Won’t you write me?
GLENN.
No sooner had Carley read the letter through to the end than she began it all over again, and on this second perusal she lingered over passages — only to reread them. That suggestion of her face sculptured by shadows on the canyon walls seemed to thrill her very soul.
She leaped up from the reading to cry out something that was unutterable. 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 I know — 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. This must constitute the only happiness she could have.
The change from strife to surrender was so novel and sweet that for days she felt renewed. It was augmented by her visits to the hospital in Bedford Park. Through her bountiful presence Virgil Rust and his comrades had many dull hours of pain and weariness alleviated and brightened. Interesting herself in the condition of the seriously disabled soldiers and possibility of their future took time and work Carley gave willingly and gladly. At first she endeavored to get acquaintances with means and leisure to help the boys, but these overtures met with such little success that she quit wasting valuable time she could herself devote to their interests.
Thus several weeks swiftly passed by. Several soldiers who had been more seriously injured than Rust improved to the extent that they were discharged. But Rust gained little or nothing. The nurse and doctor both informed Carley that Rust brightened for her, but when she was gone he lapsed into somber indifference. He did not care whether he ate or not, or whether he got well or died.
“If I do pull out, where’ll I go and what’ll I do?” he once asked the nurse.
Carley knew that Rust’s hurt was more than loss of a leg, and she decided to talk earnestly to him and try to win him to hope and effort. He had come to have a sort of reverence for her. So, biding her time, she at length found opportunity to approach his bed while his comrades were asleep or out of hearing. He endeavored to laugh her off, and then tried subterfuge, and lastly he cast off his mask and let her see his naked soul.
“Carley, I don’t want your money or that of your kind friends — whoever they are — you say will help me to get into business,” he said. “God knows I thank you and it warms me inside to find some one who appreciates what I’ve given. But I don’t want charity. . . . And I guess I’m pretty sick of the game. I’m sorry the Boches didn’t do the job right.”
“Rust, that is morbid talk,” replied Carley. “You’re ill and you just can’t see any hope. You must cheer up — fight yourself; and look at the brighter side. It’s a horrible pity you must be a cripple, but Rust, indeed life can be worth living if you make it so.”
“How could there be a brighter side when a man’s only half a man—” he queried, bitterly.
“You can be just as much a man as ever,” persisted Carley, trying to smile when she wanted to cry.
“Could you care for a man with only one leg?” he asked, deliberately.
“What a question! Why, of course I could!”
“Well, maybe you are different. Glenn always swore even if he was killed no slacker or no rich guy left at home could ever get you. Maybe you haven’t any idea how much it means to us fellows to know there are true and faithful girls. But I’ll tell you, Carley, we fellows who went across got to see things strange when we came home. The good old U. S. needs a lot of faithful girls just now, believe me.”
“Indeed that’s true,” replied Carley. “It’s a hard time for everybody, and particularly you boys who have lost so — so much.”
“I lost all, except my life — and I wish to God I’d lost that,” he replied, gloomily.
“Oh, don’t talk so!” implored Carley in distress. “Forgive me, Rust, if I hurt you. But I must tell you — that — that Glenn wrote me — you’d lost your girl. Oh, I’m sorry! It is dreadful for you now. But if you got well — and went to work — and took up life where you left it — why soon your pain would grow easier. And you’d find some happiness yet.”
“Never for me in this world.”
“But why, Rust, why? You’re no — no — Oh! I mean you have intelligence and courage. Why isn’t there anything left for you?”
“Because something here’s been killed,” he replied, and put his hand to his heart.
“Your faith? Your love of — of everything? Did the war kill it?”
“I’d gotten over that, maybe,” he said, drearily, with his somber eyes on space that seemed lettered for him. “But she half murdered it — and they did the rest.”
“They? Whom do you mean, Rust?”
“Why, Carley, I mean the people I lost my leg for!” he replied, with terrible softness.
“The British? The French?” she queried, in bewilderment.
“No!” he cried, and turned his face to the wall.
Carley dared not ask him more. She was shocked. How helplessly impotent all her earnest sympathy! No longer could she feel an impersonal, however kindly, interest in this man. His last ringing word had linked her also to his misfortune and his suffering. Suddenly he turned away from the wall. She saw him swallow laboriously. How tragic that thin, shadowed face of agony! Carley saw it differently. But for the beautiful softness of light in his eyes, she would have been unable to endure gazing longer.
“Carley, I’m bitter,” he said, “but I’m not rancorous and callous, like some of the boys. I know if you’d been my girl you’d have stuck to me.”
