The Tin Soldier Part 70

"But the rain--?"

"I like rain. I'm not sugar or salt."

Bronson, much perturbed, called up Jean. "The General's going out."

"Oh, but he mustn't, Bronson."

"I can't say 'mustn't' to him, Miss," Bronson reported dismally.

"You'd better see what you can do--"

But when Jean arrived, the General was gone!

"We'll drive out through the country," the old man had told his chauffeur, and had settled back among his cus.h.i.+ons, his cane by his side, his foot up on the opposite seat to relieve him of the weight.

And it was as he rode that he began to have a strange feeling about that foot which no longer walked or bore him lightly.

How he had marched in those bygone days! He remembered the first time he had tried to keep step with his fellows. The tune had been Yankee Doodle--with a fife and drum--and he was a raw young recruit in his queer blue uniform and visored cap--.

And how eager his feet had been, how strongly they had borne him, spurning the dust of the road--as they would bear him no more--.

There were men who envied him as he swept past them in the rain, men who felt that he had more than his share of wealth and ease, yet he would have made a glad exchange for the feet which took them where they willed.

He came at last to one of his old haunts, a small stone house on the edge of the Ca.n.a.l. From its wide porch he had often watched the slow boats go by, with men and women and children living in worlds bounded by weather-beaten decks. To-day in the rain there was a blur of lilac bushes along the tow path, but no boats were in sight; the Ca.n.a.l was a ruffled gray sheet in the April wind.

Lounging in the low-ceiled front room of the stone house were men of the type with whom he had once foregathered--men not of his cla.s.s or kind, but interesting because of their very differences--human derelicts who had welcomed him.

But now, for the first time he was not one of them. They eyed his elegances with suspicion--his fur coat, his gloves, his hat--the man whose limousine stood in front of the door was not one of them; they might beg of him, but they would never call him "Brother."

So, because his feet no longer carried him, and he must ride, he found himself cast out, as it were, by outcasts.

He ordered meat and drink for them, gave them money, made a joke or two as he limped among them, yet felt an alien. He watched them wistfully, seeing for the first time their sordidness, seeing what he himself had been, more sordid than any, because of his greater opportunities.

Sitting apart, he judged them, judged himself. If all the world were like these men, what kind of world would it be?

"Why aren't you fellows fighting?" he asked suddenly.

They stared at him. Grumbled. Why should they fight? One of them wept over it, called himself too old--.

But there were young men among them. "For G.o.d's sake get out of this--let me help you get out." The General stood up, leaned on his cane. "Look here, I've done a lot of things in my time--things like this--" his arm swept out towards the table, "and now I've only one good foot--the other will never be alive again. But you young chaps, you've got two good feet--to march. Do you know what that means, to march? Left, right, left, right and step out bravely--. Yankee Doodle and your heads up, flags flying? And you sit here like this?"

Two of the men had risen, young and strong. The General's cane pounded--he had their eyes! "Left, right, left, right--all over the world men are marching, and you sit here--"

The years seemed to have dropped from him. His voice rang with a fire that had once drawn men after him. He had led a charge at Gettysburg, and his men had followed!

And these two men would follow him. He saw the dawn of their resolve in their faces. "There's fine stuff in both of you," he said, "and the country needs you. Isn't it better to fight than to sit here? Get into my car and I'll take you down."

"Aw, what's eatin' you," one of the older men growled. "What game's this? Recruitin'?"

But the young men asked no questions. They came--glad to come. Roused out of a lethargy which had bound them. Waked by a ringing old voice.

The General was rather quiet when he reached home. Jean and Bronson, who had suffered torments, watched him with concerned eyes. And, as if he divined it, he laid his hand over Jean's. "I did a good day's work, my dear. I got two men for the Army, and I'm going to get more--"

And he did get more. He went not only in the rain, but in the warmth of the sun, when the old fruit trees bloomed along the tow path, and the backs of the mules were s.h.i.+ning black, and the women came out on deck with their was.h.i.+ng.

And always he spoke to the men of marching feet--. Now and then he sang for them in that thin old voice whose thinness was so overlaid by the pa.s.sion of his patriotism that those who listened found no flaw in it.

"He has sounded forth the trumpet that has never called retreat, He is sifting forth the hearts of men before his Judgment seat, O be swift my soul to answer him, be jubilant my feet, Our G.o.d is marching on--"

There was no faltering now, no fumbled words. With head up, singing--"Be jubilant, my feet--"

Sometimes he took Jean with him, but not always. "There are places that I don't like to have you go, my dear, but those are where I get my men."

At other times when he came out to where she sat in the car there would flash before his eyes the vision of his wife's face, as she, too, had once sat there, waiting--

Sometimes he took the children, and rode with them on a slow-moving barge from one lock to another, with the limousine meeting them at the end.

So he travelled the old paths, innocently, as he might have travelled them throughout the years.

Yet if he thought of those difficult years, he said never a word. He felt, perhaps, that there was nothing to say. He took to himself no credit for the things he was doing. If age and infirmity had brought to him a realization of all that he had missed, he was surely not to be praised for doing that which was, obviously, his duty.

Yet it gave him a new zest for life, and left Jean freer than she had been before. It left her, too, without the fear of him, which had robbed their relations.h.i.+p of all sense of security.

"You see, I never knew," she wrote in her memory book, "what might happen. I had visions of myself going after him in the night as Derry had gone and his mother. I used to dream about it, and dread it."

Yet she had said nothing of her dread to Derry in her smiling letters, and as men think of women, he had thought of her in the sick room as a guardian angel, s.h.i.+ning and serene.

And now, faint and far came to the men in the cantonments the sound of battles across the sea. The bugles calling them each morning seemed to say, "Soon, soon, you will go, you will go, you will go--"

To Derry, listening, it seemed the echo of the fairy trumpets, "_Trutter-a-trutt, trutter-a-trutt, you will go, you will go, you will go--_"

It was strange how the thought of it drew him, drew him as even the thoughts of Jean his bride did not draw--. He remembered that years ago he had smiled with a tinge of tolerant sophistication over the old lines:

"I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honor more--"

Yet here it was, a truth in his own life. A woman meaning more to him than she could ever have meant in times of peace, because he could go forth to fight for her, his life at stake, for her. It was for her, and for other women that his sword was unsheathed.

"If only they could understand it," he wrote to Jean. "You haven't any idea what rotten letters some of the women write. Blaming the men for going over seas. Blaming them for going into it at all. Taking it as a personal offense that their lovers have left them. 'If you had loved me, you couldn't have left me,' was the way one woman put it, and I found a poor fellow mooning over it and asked him what was the matter.

'It isn't a question of what we want to do, it is a question of what we've got to do, if we call ourselves men,' he said. But she couldn't see that, she was measuring her emotions by an inch rule.

"But, thank G.o.d, most of the women are the real thing--true as steel and brave. And it is those women that the men wors.h.i.+p. It is a masculine trait to want to be a sort of hero in the eyes of the woman you love. When she doesn't look at it that way, your plumes droop!"

And now the bugles rang with a clearer note--not, "You will go, you will go--" but, "Do not wait, do not wait, do not wait."

The cry from abroad was Macedonian. "Come over and help us!" It was to America that the ghosts of those fighting hordes appealed.