It was with the joy of great relief that he heard Ellis say to his underling, "Numero cinq, sur la terrace, un couvert." It was real at last. Outside, the Thames lay a great gray shadow. The lights of the Embankment flashed and twinkled across it, the tower of the House of Commons rose against the sky, and here, inside, the waiter was hurrying toward him carrying a smoking plate of rich soup with a pungent intoxicating odor.
And then the ragged palms, the glaring sun, the immovable peaks, and the white surf stood again before him. The iron rails swept up and sank again, the fever sucked at his bones, and the pillow scorched his cheek.
One morning for a brief moment he came back to real life again and lay quite still, seeing everything about him with clear eyes and for the first time, as though he had but just that instant been lifted over the ship's side. His keeper, glancing up, found the prisoner's eyes considering him curiously, and recognized the change. The instinct of discipline brought him to his feet with his fingers at his sides.
"Is the Lieutenant feeling better?"
The Lieutenant surveyed him gravely.
"You are one of our hospital stewards."
"Yes, Lieutenant."
"Why ar'n't you with the regiment?"
"I was wounded, too, sir. I got it same time you did, Lieutenant.""Am I wounded? Of course, I remember. Is this a hospital ship?"The steward shrugged his shoulders. "She's one of the transports. They have turned her over to the fever cases."The Lieutenant opened his lips to ask another question; but his own body answered that one, and for a moment he lay silent.
"Do they know up North that I--that I'm all right?""Oh, yes, the papers had it in--there was pictures of the Lieutenant in some of them.""Then I've been ill some time?"
"Oh, about eight days."
The soldier moved uneasily, and the nurse in him became uppermost.
"I guess the Lieutenant hadn't better talk any more," he said.
It was his voice now which held authority.
The Lieutenant looked out at the palms and the silent gloomy mountains and the empty coast-line, where the same wave was rising and falling with weary persistence.
"Eight days," he said. His eyes shut quickly, as though with a sudden touch of pain. He turned his head and sought for the figure at the foot of the cot. Already the figure had grown faint and was receding and swaying.
"Has any one written or cabled?" the Lieutenant spoke, hurriedly.
He was fearful lest the figure should disappear altogether before he could obtain his answer. "Has any one come?""Why, they couldn't get here, Lieutenant, not yet."The voice came very faintly. "You go to sleep now, and I'll run and fetch some letters and telegrams. When you wake up, may be I'll have a lot for you."But the Lieutenant caught the nurse by the wrist, and crushed his hand in his own thin fingers. They were hot, and left the steward's skin wet with perspiration. The Lieutenant laughed gayly.
"You see, Doctor," he said, briskly, "that you can't kill me. Ican't die. I've got to live, you understand. Because, sir, she said she would come. She said if I was wounded, or if I was ill, she would come to me. She didn't care what people thought. She would come any way and nurse me--well, she will come.
"So, Doctor--old man--" He plucked at the steward's sleeve, and stroked his hand eagerly, "old man--" he began again, beseechingly, "you'll not let me die until she comes, will you?
What? No, I know I won't die. Nothing made by man can kill me.
No, not until she comes. Then, after that--eight days, she'll be here soon, any moment? What? You think so, too? Don't you?
Surely, yes, any moment. Yes, I'll go to sleep now, and when you see her rowing out from shore you wake me. You'll know her; you can't make a mistake. She is like--no, there is no one like her--but you can't make a mistake."That day strange figures began to mount the sides of the ship, and to occupy its every turn and angle of space. Some of them fell on their knees and slapped the bare deck with their hands, and laughed and cried out, "Thank God, I'll see God's country again!" Some of them were regulars, bound in bandages; some were volunteers, dirty and hollow-eyed, with long beards on boys' faces. Some came on crutches; others with their arms around the shoulders of their comrades, staring ahead of them with a fixed smile, their lips drawn back and their teeth protruding.
At every second step they stumbled, and the face of each was swept by swift ripples of pain.
They lay on cots so close together that the nurses could not walk between them. They lay on the wet decks, in the scuppers, and along the transoms and hatches. They were like shipwrecked mariners clinging to a raft, and they asked nothing more than that the ship's bow be turned toward home. Once satisfied as to that, they relaxed into a state of self-pity and miserable oblivion to their environment, from which hunger nor nausea nor aching bones could shake them.
The hospital steward touched the Lieutenant lightly on the shoulder.
"We are going North, sir," he said. "The transport's ordered North to New York, with these volunteers and the sick and wounded. Do you hear me, sir?"The Lieutenant opened his eyes. "Has she come?" he asked.
"Gee!" exclaimed the hospital steward. He glanced impatiently at the blue mountains and the yellow coast, from which the transport was drawing rapidly away.
"Well, I can't see her coming just now," he said. "But she will," he added.
"You let me know at once when she comes."
"Why, cert'nly, of course," said the steward.
Three trained nurses came over the side just before the transport started North. One was a large, motherly-looking woman, with a German accent. She had been a trained nurse, first in Berlin, and later in the London Hospital in Whitechapel, and at Bellevue.
