“Bye, for God’s sake, speak to me. This is Peter, Peter Bye, you remember?”
The young doctor repeated the name thickly. “Yes, Peter. I know. I’m dying.”
“Not yet. Man, it’s almost day, they’ll come to us. Pull yourself together. We’ll save you somehow.”
Meriwether whispered, “I’m cold.”
Could he get his coat off? How could he ever pull it off that shattered arm? Still he achieved even this, wrapping it around the white man’s shivering form, raising that face, gray as the gray day above them, high on his chest, cradling him like a baby.
The chill was the chill of death, a horrible death. Meriwether coughed and choked; Peter could feel the life struggling within the poor torn body. Once the cold lips said: “Peter, you’re a good scout.”
Just before a merciful unconsciousness enveloped him for the last time, Meriwether sat upright in the awful agony of death. “Grandfather,” he called in a terrible voice, “this is the last of the Byes.”
When the stretcher-bearers found them, Meriwether was lying across Peter’s knees, his face turned childwise toward Peter’s breast. The colored man’s head had dropped low over the fair one and his black curly hair fell forward straight and stringy, caked in the blood which lay in a well above Meriwether’s heart.
“Cripes!” said one of the rescue men, “I’ve seen many a sight in this war, but none ever give me the turn I got seein’ that smoke’s hair dabblin’ in the other fellow’s blood.”
XXXI
Chambéry, the capital of Savoy, a town situated toward the south of the extreme east of France, has not always been as well known to America as its more important neighbors, Grenoble and Lyons. Up to a few years ago it was celebrated chiefly because it was the location of the château of the old dukes of Savoy and the birthplace of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Now it is known to thousands and thousands of Americans because during the great War it was metamorphosed into a rest center for colored soldiers.
To the tourist’s mind it might stand out for three reasons: as a city in which it is well nigh impossible to get a lost telegram repeated; as a place where one may procure at very little expense the most excellent of manicures and the most delicious of little cakes. And, thirdly, as the scene of a novel by Henri Bordeaux, La Peur de Vivre, the story of a young girl who, afraid to face the perils of life, forfeited therefore its pleasures.
Certainly Alice Du Laurens, the young woman of Bordeaux’ novel, would have been no more astonished to find herself in New York than Maggie Ellersley, whom she so closely resembled in character, was to find herself in Chambéry. The nervous shock which Harry Portor had predicted from her encounter with Neal followed only too surely, but for another reason. The flesh wound itself had been negligible and she might have recovered without the nervous breakdown, had not Mr. Simpson in an agony of remorse at the danger to which he had so unwittingly exposed her, subjected her again with equally complete unconscious thoroughness to another shock. He was always presenting her with flowers, magazines, and journals, his eyes silently beseeching her forgiveness. For Maggie had never betrayed his share in the disaster and had thus made him her eager servitor forever.
Two weeks after the accident he brought her an evening paper. “Just picked this up as I come along, Miss Maggie. But there’s some flowers comin’ later on.”
She took the folded paper listlessly and let her eyes travel over the front sheet. A tiny paragraph leaped at her from the bottom of a column. “Negro Leaps In Front Of Subway Train.”
“A Negro, later identified as Henderson Neal, was killed instantly this afternoon—”
They found it hard to quiet her. “I killed him,” she moaned to Harry Portor, hastily summoned. “His death is as much due to me as though I had poisoned him. I did poison his life.”
Portor was at his wits’ end. She was too weak to be sent away from home by herself. Her mother could not leave the house, for Maggie’s illness had decidedly crippled her resources. And once more they were dependent on lodgers for their livelihood.
Once Portor spoke to her of Peter, thinking to comfort her, but the allusion only made her worse. “Peter! I was getting ready to ruin his life, too. Oh, how awful everything is. If I could only see him again!”
It was all very odd, Harry thought, wondering if Joanna could interpret this. The situation was too complex for him to handle.
It was her first cry of penitence, and as she lay there day after day reviewing her life she came to understand and to analyze for what it was that quality of hers, that tendency to climb to the position she wanted over the needs and claims of others. Now that she had no strength, now that life stretched around her a dreary procession of sullen, useless days, she realized the beauty inherent in life itself, the miracle of health and sane nerves, of the ability to make a living, of being helpful to others.
“Why, Henderson, even Henderson—if I could have taken him back that first time, I
