The Guarded Heights
imagined himself a part. Temporarily he was back at the starting point,
the George Morton who had lifted Sylvia in his arms, blurting out
impossible words, staring at her lips with an abrupt and narrow
realization that sooner or later he would have to touch them.
Sylvia's quick action brought some of it back, but he had no remorse, no
feeling of reversion, for the moment itself was naked, inimical to
masquerade.
"Lambert!" she called.
Her voice didn't suggest fright or too sharp a hurry. Looking at her
face he could understand how much her control had cost, for her
expression was that of the girl Sylvia, filled with antipathy,
abhorrence, an inability to believe. It appeared to tell him that if he
had ever advanced toward her at all, he had just now forced himself back
to his own side of the vast space dividing them.
"Don't be a fool," he whispered. "I could take it, but you have to
give."
Her lips were pressed tight as if in a defence against the possible
approach of his. They both heard a quick step outside. He let her arms
go, and turned to the door where Dalrymple stood, unquestionably good to
look upon in his uniform. He frowned at this picture which might have
suggested to him a real intimacy between George Morton and Sylvia
Planter.
"Lambert's gone on with Betty and the others. What's up?"
Sylvia's voice wasn't quite steady.
"The Major can't leave the area. I want somebody to take me to Officers'
House."
George nodded. He had quite recovered his control, and he knew he had
failed, that there was nothing more to be done. The thought of the
doubtful days ahead was like a great burden on his soul.
"I've one more word for the Major," she said at the door, motioning
Dalrymple on.
George went close to her.
"It's only this," she said. "I'm sorry it had to come at the last
minute."
He laughed shortly.
"It was the last minute that made it. I'm not sorry."
Her face twisted passionately, as if she were on the point of angry
tears.
"I hope I shall never see you again. Do you understand that?"
"Quite," he said, dryly. "To George on going to the wars!"
"I didn't mean just that," she cried, angrily.
"It's your only chance," he said, "and I can understand how you can wish
I shouldn't come back."
"I didn't mean it," she repeated.
"Don't count too heavily on it," he went on. "I can't imagine dying
before having had what I have always wanted, have always sooner or later
intended to get. If I come back I shall have it."
Without another word she turned and left him. He watched her walk side
by side with Dalrymple out of the area.
IX
There were moments on the voyage, in the training area in Flanders, even
at the front, when he was sorry he had tried to take something of Sylvia
with him to battle; for, as it was, he had of her nothing whatever
except a wish that she should never see him again. There was a deep
irony, consequently, in his official relations with her brother, for it
was Lambert who saluted him, who addressed him perpetually as "sir," who
wanted to know if the major would approve of this, that, or the other.
It was grotesque. He wanted to cry aloud against this necessary
servility of a man whose sister couldn't abide the inferiority of its
object.
And he hated war, its waste, its bad management, its discomforts, its
dangers. Was it really true he had involved himself in this filth
because of Sylvia? Then that was funny. By gad, he would see her again!
But he watched his chances dwindle.
While the battalion was in reserve in Lorraine Lambert and he ran into
Dalrymple at the officers' club beneath division headquarters in
Baccarat. George saw him first.
"The intrepid warrior takes his ease," he muttered.
Dalrymple left three staff men he was with and hurried across the room.
"New York must be a lonesome place," he said. "Everybody here. Had a
letter from Sylvia, Lambert."
Why should she write to him? Far from women's eyes he was back at it.
One of the staff men, in fact, wandered over and whispered to George.
"Either you chaps from the trains? Somebody ought to take him to his
billet. General or chief-of-staff might drift through. Believe he'd slap
'em on the shoulder."
"Not a bad idea," George said, contemptuously.
Dalrymple didn't even try to be cordial to him, knowing George wasn't
likely to make trouble as long as they were in France. Lambert took care
of him, steered him home, and a few days later told George with
surprised laughter that the man had been transferred to a showy and
perfectly safe job at G.H.Q.
"Papa, and mama, and Washington!" Lambert laughed.
"Splendid thing for the war," George sneered.
But he raved with Lambert when Goodhue was snatched away by a general
who chose his aides for their names and social attainments.
"Spirit's all through the army," Goodhue complained, bitterly. "Why
doesn't it occur to them to get the right men for the right places?"
He sighed.
"Suppose we'll get through somehow, but there'll be too much mourning
sold at home."
All along that had been in George's mind, and, in his small way, he did
what he could, studying minutely methods of accomplishing his missions
at the minimum cost to his battalion; but on the Vesle he grew
discouraged, seeing his men fall not to rise; or to be lifted to a
stretcher; or to scramble up and stagger back swathed with first-aid
rolls, dodging shells and machine-gun spirts; or, and in some ways that
was hardest of all to watch, to be led by some bandaged ones, blinded
and vomiting from gas.
He had no consecutive sleep. He never got his clothes off. He snatched
food from a tin can. He suffered from the universal dysentery. He was
under constant fire. He lay in shallow funk holes, conferring with his
company and platoon commanders. At best he sat in the cellar of a
smashed house, poring, by the light of a candle, over maps and
complicated orders. Most of the time he wore a gas mask which had the
advantage, however, of shutting out the stifling odour of decay. He
never had time to find out if he was afraid. He reached a blessed state
of indifference where getting hit appeared an inevitable and restful
prospect.
Driggs Wandel arrived surprisingly on the day the Germans were falling
back to the Aisne, at a moment when most of the artillery fire was
coming from the American side, when it was possible to sit on a sunny
bank outside the battalion dugout breathing only stale souvenirs of last
night's gas shells.
"_Bon jour_, most powerful and disreputable of majors!"
George held out his hand.
"Bring any chocolate, Driggs? Sit down, you idiot. Jerry's never seen
such a nice new uniform."
Suddenly he lost his temper. Why the devil couldn't he get some pleasure
out of this extraordinary reunion? Why did he have to greet Wandel as if
he had seen him daily since their parting more than three years ago on a
dusky pier in New York? He had heard that Wandel, with the declaration
of war, had left the ambulance for a commission in the field artillery.
He saw him now wearing the insignia of a general staff major.
"Just attached to your corps headquarters," Wandel said. "Didn't want
the job, would rather have been a fighting man with my pretty guns.
Suppose some fool of a friend of the family brought the usual influence
without consulting me."
"Glad to see you, Driggs," George muttered, "although I don't seem able
to tell you so. How did you get here?"
"Guide from regimental headquarters. Wanted to see how the submerged
heroes live. Nasty, noisy, smelly spot to be heroic in."
"A picnic to-day."
"I've always suspected," Wandel said, "that picnics were unhealthy."
"Better have come," George grinned, "any other day we've been here the
past few weeks."
Wandel laughed.
"Don't think I didn't pick my day. The general staff takes no
unnecessary risks. Tell me, my George, when did you shave last? When did
you wash your pretty face last? When did you take your swank clothes off
last?"
"I think when I was a very little boy," George sighed.
Wandel became abruptly serious, turned so, perhaps, by a large shell
fragment, still warm, which he had picked up. As he fingered it he
stared at George.
"I know," George said, "that I point a moral, but even little boys would
be glad to be made clean if they got like this. Don't rub it in."
"To the contrary," Wandel said, thoughtfully, "I'm going back over a lot
of years. I'm remembering how that most extraordinary man, Freshman
George Morton, looked. I'm thinking that I've always been right about
you."
The warm sun, the diminution of racket, this sudden companionship, had
drawn George a little from his indifferent, half-dazed condition. He,
too, could look back, and without discomfort. On the Vesle it was only
death that counted. Birth didn't amount to a hill of beans, or money, or
education, except in that it made a man an officer. So George answered
frankly:
"All along you've guessed a lot about me, Driggs."
"Known, George."
"Would you mind telling me how?"
"It would be a pleasure to point out to you," Wandel drawled, "that a
lot of people aren't half as big fools as you've credited them with
being. You looked a little what you were at first. You've probably
forgotten that when you matriculated you put down a place of residence,
a record easily available for one who saw, as I did, means of using you.
Even a fool could have guessed something was up the night Betty was good
enough to make herself a part of the _beau monde_. I gathered a lot from
Lambert then."
"Yet," George said, almost indifferently, "you went on being a friend."
"Your political manager, George," Wandel corrected. "I'm not sure it
would have gone much further if it hadn't been for Dicky."
George was thoroughly aroused at last.
"Did Dicky know?"
"Not mere facts," Wandel answered. "What difference did they make? But
he could see what you had started from, how great the climb you were
taking. That's why he liked and admired you, because of what you were,
not because of what you wanted people to think you were. That's really
what first attracted me to you, and it amused me to see you fancying you
were getting away with so much more than you really were."
"Extraordinary!" George managed. "Then the heights are not so well
guarded?"
"Ah, yes--guarded," Wandel said, "but not against great men."
George kicked at the ground with his heel.
"Funny how unimportant it all seems here," he muttered.
It wasn't only the surroundings that made it seem unimportant; it was
his remembrance of Sylvia who had known more than Wandel, more than
anybody, yet had never opened the gate.
"You've taken all my conceit away," he went on. "Once it might have made
me want to put myself out. Now I'm quite content to let Jerry do it."
Wandel's voice warmed, was less affected than George had ever heard it.
"What are you talking about? You've won a great victory. You should
carry laurels on your brow. You've climbed to the top. You've defined
for us all a possible socialism."
George smiled.
"A hell of a thing to talk about here! But tell that to Squibs, will
you, little man, when you get back? We've had some rare battles over
it."
Wandel hurried on.
"You've made yourself one of us, if it's any satisfaction. You're as
good as the best of us--of the inheritors."
George folded his arms on his knees and bowed his head. Wandel's voice
was startled.
"What's up?"
"Maybe I'm crying," George mumbled. "Ought to be, because I'm so filthy
tired, and I know you're wrong, Driggs. I'm rotten inside. I haven't
even started to climb."
But when he looked up there were no tears in his eyes, and his dirty
face had altered with its old whimsical smile.