The Guarded Heights

"Pray that it doesn't," Wandel said. "I fancy the real hell of war comes after the war is over. We'll find that out, if we live. As for me, even now when we're all beloved brothers, I'd give a good deal to be sitting in a Fifth Avenue club looking out on lesser men."

"I would, too," George said, fervently.

Lambert spoke with abysmal seriousness.

"I'd rather have some of the splendid lesser men sitting on the same side of the window with me."

George stared at him. What had happened to this aristocrat who had once made a medieval gesture with a horse whip? Certainly he, the plebeian victim of that attack, had no such wish. Put these men on the same side of a club window, or a factory window, for that matter, and they'd drag the whole business down to their level, to eternal smash fast enough. Why, hang Lambert! It amounted to visualizing his sister as a slattern. He smiled with a curious pride. Reddest revolution couldn't make her that. She wouldn't come down off her high horse if a dozen bayonets were at her throat. What the deuce was he thinking about? Why should he be proud of that? For, if he lived, he was going to drag her off himself, but he wouldn't make her a slattern.

"You talk like Allen," he said, "and you haven't even his excuse."

"I've seen the primeval for the first time," Lambert answered.

"I'll admit it has qualities," Wandel yawned. "Anyway, I'm off."

Mrs. Planter came back to George's mind, momentarily as primeval as a man surrendered to the battle lust. What one saw, except in self-destructive emergencies, he told himself, was all veneer. Ages, epochs, generations, merely determined its depth. The hell after war! Did Wandel mean there was danger then of an attempt to thin the veneer? Was Lambert, of all people, going to assist the Allens to plane it away?

"It would mean another dark ages," he mused.

His own little self-imposed coat he saw now had gone on top of a far thicker one without which he would have been as helpless as a bushman or some anthropoidal creature escaped from an unexplored country.

He laughed, but uncomfortably. Those two had made him uneasy, and Squibs, naturally, was at Lambert's folly. There had been a letter a day or two ago which he had scarcely had time to read because of the demands of an extended movement and the confusion of receiving replacements and re-equipping the men he had. He read it over now. "Understanding," "Brotherhood."

"You are helping to bring it about, because you are helping to win this war."

In a fit of irritation he tore the letter up. What the devil was he fighting the war for?

The question wouldn't let him asleep. Lambert, Wandel, and Squibs between them had made him for the first time in his life thoroughly, uncomfortably, abominably afraid – physically afraid – afraid of being killed. For all at once there was more than Sylvia to make him want to live. He didn't see how he could die without knowing what the deuce he was fighting this man's war for, anyway.

XI

He hadn't learned any more about it when Lambert and he were caught on the same afternoon a week later.

In the interminable, haggard thicket the attack had abruptly halted. Word reached George that Lambert's company was falling back. To him that was beyond belief if Lambert was still with his men. He hurried forward before regimental headquarters had had a chance to open its distant mouth. There were machine-gun nests ahead, foolish stragglers told him. Of course. Those were what he had ordered Lambert to take. The company was disorganized. Little groups slunk back, dragging their rifles as if they were too heavy. Others squatted in the underbrush, waiting apparently for some valuable advice.

George found the senior lieutenant, crouched behind a fallen log, getting the company in hand again through runners.

"Where's Captain Planter?"

The lieutenant nodded carelessly ahead.

"Hundred yards or so out there. He ran the show too much himself," he complained. "Bunch of Jerries jumped out of the thicket and threw potato mashers, then crawled back to the guns. When the captain went down the men near him broke. Sort of thing spreads like a pestilence."

"Dead?" George asked.

"Don't know. Potato mashers!"

"Why haven't you found out?" George asked, irritably.

The complaining note increased in the other's voice.

"He's at the foot of that tree. Hear those guns? They're just zipping a few while they wait for someone to get to him."

"Pull your company together," George said with an absurd feeling that he spoke to Mrs. Planter. "I'll go along and see that we get him and those nests. They're spoiling the entire afternoon."

The lieutenant glanced at him, startled.

"I can do it – "

"You haven't," George reminded him.

He despatched runners to the flank companies and to regimental headquarters announcing that he was moving ahead. When the battalion advanced, like a lot of fairly clever Indians, he was in the van, making straight for the tree. He had a queer idea that Mrs. Planter quietly searched in the underbrush ahead of him. The machine guns, which had been trickling, gushed.

"You're hit, sir," the lieutenant said.

George glanced at his right boot. There was a hole in the leather, but he didn't feel any pain. He dismissed the lieutenant's suggestion of stretcher bearers. He limped ahead. Why should he assume this risk for Lambert? Sylvia wouldn't thank him for it. She wouldn't thank him for anything, but her mother would. He had to get Lambert back and complete his task, but he was afraid to examine the still form he saw at last at the base of the tree, and he knew very well that that was only because Lambert was his friend. He designated a man to guide the stretcher bearers, and bent, his mind full of swift running and vicious tackles, abrupt and brutal haltings of this figure that seemed to be asleep, that would never run again.

Lambert stirred.

"Been expecting you, George," he said, sleepily.

"Anything besides your leg?" George asked.

"Guess not," Lambert answered. "What more do you want? Thanks for coming."

George left him to the stretcher bearers and hurried on full of envy; for Lambert was going home, and George hadn't dared stop to urge him to forget that dangerous nonsense he had talked the other night. Nonsense! You had only to look at these brown figures trying to flank the spouting guns. Why did they have to glance continually at him? Why had they paused when he had paused to speak to Lambert? Same side of the window! But a few of them stumbled and slept as they fell.

He had just begun to worry about the blood in his right boot when something snapped at the bone of his good leg, and he pitched forward helplessly.

"Some tackle!" he thought.

Then through his brain, suddenly confused, flashed an overwhelming gratitude. He couldn't walk. He couldn't go forward. He wouldn't have to take any more risks beyond those shared with the stretcher bearers who would carry him back. Like Lambert, he was through. He was going home – home to Sylvia, to success, to the coveted knowledge of why he had fought this war.

The lieutenant, frightened, solicitous, crawled to him, summoning up the stretcher bearers, for the advance had gone a little ahead, the German range had shortened to meet it.

"How bad, sir?"

George indicated his legs.

"Never learned how to walk on my hands."

The lieutenant straightened, calling out cursing commands. George managed to achieve a sitting posture. By gad! This leg hurt! It made him a little giddy. Only once before, he thought vaguely, had he experienced such pain. What was the trouble here? The advance had halted, probably because the word had spread that he was down.

What was it Lambert had said about putting the rank and file on the same side of the window? The rank and file wanted an officer, and the higher the officer the farther it would go. That was answer enough for Lambert, Squibs, Allen – And he would point it out to them all, for the stretcher bearers had come up, had lifted him to the stretcher, were ready to start him back to decency, to safety —

Thank God there wasn't any multitude or an insane trainer here to order him about.

"They've stopped again," the lieutenant sobbed. "Some of them are coming back."

That sort of thing did spread like a pestilence, but there was nothing George could do about it. He had done his job. Good job, too. Soft billet now. Decency. Sylvia. No Green. No multitude —

"You make a touchdown!"

And he became aware at last of the multitude – raving higher officers in comfortable places; countless victims of invasion, waiting patiently to go home; myriads in the cities, intoxicated with enthusiasm and wine, tumbling happily from military play to patriotic bazaar; but most eloquent of all in that innumerable company were the silent and cold brown figures lying about him in the underbrush.

His brain, a little delirious, was filled with the roaring from the stands. The crowd was commanding him to get ahead somehow, to wipe out those deadly nests, to let the regiment, the army, tired nations, sweep on to peace and the end of an unbelievable madness.

Once more he glanced through blurred eyes at his clothing and saw livery, and this time he had put it on of his own free will. He seemed to hear Squibs:

"World lives by service."

"I'm in the service," he thought. "Got to serve."

It impressed him as quite pitiful that now he would never know just why.

"Where you going?" he demanded of the stretcher bearers who had begun to carry him back.

They tried to explain, hurrying a little. He threatened them with his revolver.

"Turn around. Let's go – with the battalion."

The lieutenant saw, the men saw, these frightened figures running with loping steps, carrying a stretcher which they jerked and twitched so that the figure lying on it with arm raised, holding a revolver, suffered agonies and struggled not to be flung to the ground. And the lieutenant and the men sprang to their feet, ran forward, shouted:

"Follow the Major!"

The German gunners, caught by surprise, hesitated, had trouble, therefore, shortening their ranges; and as panic spreads so does the sudden spirit of victory.

"Same side of the window!" George grumbled as the bearers set him down behind the captured guns.

"Just the same," he rambled, "fine fellows. Who said they weren't fine fellows?"

He wanted to argue it angrily with a wounded German propped against a shattered tree, but the lieutenant interrupted him, bringing up a medical orderly, asking him if he had any instructions. George answered very pleasantly:

"Not past me, Mr. Planter! Rank and file myself!"

The lieutenant glanced significantly at the medical orderly. He looked sharply at George's hair and suddenly pointed.

"They nicked him in the head, too."

The orderly knelt and examined the place the lieutenant had indicated.

"Oh, no, sir. That's quite an old scar."

XII

"Lost a leg or two?" Allen asked.

"Not yet. Don't think I shall. Planter's not so lucky, but he'll get home sooner."

Allen brought George his one relief from the deadly monotony of the base hospital. He had sent for him because he wanted his opinion as to the possibility of an armistice. Blodgett, however, hadn't waited for the result of the conference. The day Allen arrived a letter came from him, telling George not to worry.

"King Ferdy along about the last of September whispered I'd better begin to unload. It's a killing, George."

With his mind clear of that George could be amused by Allen. The friend of the people wore some striking clothes from London tailors and haberdashers. He carried a cunning little cane. He had managed something extremely neat in moustaches. He spoke with a perceptible West End accent. But in reply to George's sneering humour he made this astonishing remark:

"It isn't nearly as much fun being a top-hole person as I thought it was going to be."

"You're lucky to have found it out," George said, "for your job's about over. Of course I could get you something in Wall Street."

"Doubt if I should want it," Allen said. "I've always got my old job."

George whistled.

"You mean you'd go back to long hair, cheap clothes, and violent words?"

"Why not? I only took your offer, Morton, because I was inclined to agree with you that in the outside world's anxiety to look at what was going on over the fence people'd stop thinking. Russia didn't stop thinking, and after the armistice you watch America begin to use its brain."

"You mean the downtrodden," George sneered.

"That's the greater part of any country," Allen said, his acquired accent forgotten, his perfectly clean hands commencing to gesture.

But George wouldn't listen to him, got rid of him, turned to the wall with an ugly feeling that he had gone out of his way to nurture one of the makers of the hell after war.

PART V

THE NEW WORLD

I

George crushed his uneasy thoughts, trying to dwell instead on the idea that he was going back to the normal, but all at once he experienced a dread of the normal, perhaps, because he was no longer normal himself. Could he limp before Sylvia with his old assurance? Would people pity him, or would he irritate them because he had a disability? And snatches of his talks at the front with Wandel etched themselves sharply against his chaotic recollections of those days. Was Wandel fair? Was it, indeed, the original George Morton people had always liked? Here, apart from the turmoil, he didn't believe it, didn't dare believe it. Those people wouldn't have cared for him except for his assumption of qualities which he had chosen as from a counter display. Yet was it the real George Morton that made him in superlative moments break the traces of his acquired judgments, as he had done at New Haven, in the Argonne, to dash selflessly into the service of others? Rotten inside, indeed! Even in the hospital he set out to crush that impulsive, dangerous part of him.

But the nearer he drew to home the more he suffered from a depression that he could only define as homesickness – homesickness for the old ways, the old habits, the old thoughts; and the memory of his temerity with Sylvia at the moment of their parting was like a great cloud threatening the future with destructive storm.

Lambert, wearing a contrivance the doctors had given him in place of what the country had taken away, accompanied by Betty and the Baillys, met the transport. Betty and Mrs. Bailly cried, and George shook his heavy stick at them.

"See here! I'm not going to limp like this always."

Bailly encircled him with his thin arms.

"You're too old to play football, anyway, George."

George found himself wanting Betty's arms, their forgetfulness, their understanding, their tenderness.

"When are you two going to be married?" he forced himself to ask.

Betty looked away, her white cheeks flushing, but Lambert hurried an answer.

"As soon as you're able to get to Princeton. You're to be best man."

"Honoured."

So Lambert's crippling hadn't made any difference to Betty, but how did Sylvia take it? He wanted to ask Lambert where she was, if anything had happened to her, any other mad affair, now that the war was over, like the one with Blodgett; but he couldn't ask, and no one volunteered to tell him, and it wasn't until his visit to Oakmont, on his first leave from the hospital, that he learned anything whatever about her, and that was only what his eyes in a moment told him.

Lambert drove over and got George, explaining that his mother wanted to see him.

"She'd have come to the dock," he said, "but Father these days is rather hard to leave."

George went reluctantly, belligerently, for since his landing his feeling of homesickness had increased with the realization that his victorious country was more radically altered than he had fancied. The ride, however, had the advantage of an uninterrupted talk with Lambert which developed gossip that Blodgett, stuffed with business, hadn't yet given him.

Goodhue and Wandel, for instance, were still abroad, holding down showy jobs at the peace conference. Dalrymple, on the other hand, had been home for months.

"Most successful war," Lambert told George. "Scarcely smelled fire, but got a couple foreign decorations, and a promotion – my poor old leg wasn't worth it, or yours, George, but what odds now? And as soon as the show stopped at Sedan he was trotting back. Can't help admiring him, for that sort of thing spells success, and he's steady as a church. Try to realize that, and take a new start with him, for he's really likeable when he keeps to the straight and narrow. Prohibition's going to fit in very well, although I believe he's got himself in hand."

George stared at the ugly, familiar landscape, trying not to listen, particularly to the rest. Why should the Planters have taken Dalrymple into the marble temple?

"A small start," Lambert was saying, "but if he makes the grade there's a big future for him there. I fancy he's anxious to meet you halfway. How about you, George?"

"I'll make no promises," George said. "It depends entirely on Dalrymple."

Lambert didn't warn him, so he didn't expect to find Dalrymple enjoying the early spring graces of Oakmont. He managed the moment of meeting, however, without disclosing anything. Dalrymple, for the time, was quite unimportant. It was Sylvia he was anxious about, Sylvia who undoubtedly nursed a sort of horror of what he had ventured to do and say at Upton. Everyone else was outside, as if making a special effort to welcome him. Where was she?

He resented the worshipful attentions of the servants.

"I'm quite capable of managing myself," he said, as he motioned them aside and lowered himself from the automobile.

He disliked old Planter's heartiness, although he could see the physical effort it cost, for the once-threatening eyes were nearly dark; and the big shoulders stooped forward as if in a constant effort to escape a pursuing pain; and the voice, which talked about heroes and the country's debt and the Planters' debt, quavered and once or twice broke altogether, then groped doubtfully ahead in an effort to recover the propelling thought.

Mrs. Planter, at least, spared him any sentimental gratitude. She was rather grayer and had in her face some unremembered lines, but those were the only changes George could detect. As far as her manner went this greeting might have followed the farewell at Upton after only a day or so.

"I hope your wound isn't very painful."

"My limping," he answered, "is simply bad habit. I'm overcoming it."

"That's nice. Then you'll be able to play polo again!"

"I should hope so, as long as ponies have four good legs."

He wished other people could be like her, so unobtrusively, unannoyingly primeval.

As he entered the hall he saw Sylvia without warning, and he caught his breath and watched her as she came slowly down the stairs. He tried to realize that this was that coveted moment he had so frequently fancied the war would deny him – the moment that brought him face to face with Sylvia again, to witness her enmity, to desire to break it down, to want her more than he had ever done.

She came straight to him, but even in the presence of the others she didn't offer her hand, and all she said was:

"I was quite sure you would come back."

"You knew I had to," he laughed.

Then he sharpened his ears, for she was telling her brother something about Betty's having telephoned she was driving over to take Lambert, Dalrymple, and herself to Princeton.

No. The war had changed her less than any one George had seen. She was as beautiful, as unforgiving, as intolerant; and he guessed that it was she and not Betty who had made the arrangement which would take her away from him.

"George will come, too," Lambert began.

"Afraid I'm not up to it," George refused, dryly.

At Betty's wedding, however, she would have to be with him, for it developed during this nervous chatter that they would share the honours of the bridal party.

So, helplessly, he had to watch her go, and for a moment he felt as if he had had a strong tonic, for she alone had been able to give him an impression that the world hadn't altered much, after all.

The reaction came in the quiet hours following. He was at first resentful that Mrs. Planter should accompany him on the painful walk the doctors had ordered him, like Old Planter, to take daily. He had wanted to go back to the little house, highest barrier of all which Sylvia would never let him climb. Then, glancing at the quiet woman, he squared his shoulders. Suppose Wandel had been right! Here was a test. At any rate, the war was a pretty large and black background for so tiny a high light. Purposefully, therefore, he carried out his original purpose. By the side of Mrs. Planter he limped toward the little house. They didn't say much. It wasn't easy for him to talk while he exercised, and perhaps she understood that.

Even before the clean white building shone in the sun through the trees he heard a sound that made him wince. It was like a distant drum, badly played. Then he understood what it was, and his boyhood, and the day of awakening and revolt, submerged him in a hot wave of shame. He could see his mother rising and bending rhythmically over fine linen which emerged from dirty water, making her arms look too red and swollen. He glanced quickly at Mrs. Planter to whose serenity had gone the upward effort of many generations. Just how appalling, now that war had mocked life so dreadfully, now that a pitiless hand had a moment ago stripped all pretence from the world, was the difference between them?

It was the woman at the tub, curiously enough, who seemed trying to tell him, trying to warn him to keep his mouth shut. Then the house was visible through the trees. He raised his stick.

"I wanted to see it again," he said, defiantly, "because I was born there. I lived there."

She paused and stared with him, without saying anything, without any change of expression. After a time she turned.

"Have you looked enough? Shall we go back, George?"

He nodded, glancing at her wonderingly. After all, he had had very little love in his life. Mrs. Bailly, Betty —

He had never dreamed of such gratitude as this. Lambert, home with his war madness fresh upon him, must have told her, as an example of what a man might do. But was her action all gratitude? Rather wasn't it a signpost at the parting of two ages?

If that were so, he told himself, the world had left Sylvia hopelessly behind.

II

The memory of that unguarded moment remained in his mind uncomfortably. He carried it finally from the hospital to his musty apartment, where he stripped off his uniform and looked in the glass, for the first time in nearly two years his own master, no man's servant.

Was he his own master as long as he could commit such sentimental follies, as long as he could suspect that he had told Wandel the truth on the Vesle? This nostalgia must be the rebound from the war, of which he had heard so much, which made men weak, or lazy, or indifferent.

He continued to stare in the glass, angry, amazed. He had to overcome this homesick feeling. He had to prepare himself for harder battles than he had ever fought. He had had plenty of warning of the selfishness that was creeping over the world like a black pestilence. Where was his own self-will that had carried him so far?

He locked himself, as it were, in his apartment. He sat down and called on his will. With a systematic brutality he got himself in hand. He reviewed his aims: to make more money, to get Sylvia. He emerged at last, hard and uncompromising, ready for the selfish ones, and went down town. Blodgett greeted him with a cheer.

"Miracles! For the first time since you got back you look yourself again."

"I am," George answered, "all but the limp. That will go some day maybe."

He wanted it to go. He desired enormously to rid himself of the last reminder of his service.

Lambert was definitely caught by the marble temple, but Goodhue and he would stay together, more or less tied to Blodgett, to accept the opportunities George foresaw for dragging money by sharp reasoning from the reconstruction period. He applied himself to exchange. From their position they could run wild in the stock market at little risk, but there were big things to be made out of exchange, about which the cleverest men didn't seem to know anything worth a penny in any currency.