In a Little Town Part 31

He followed her, wondering rather than fearing, and she swept a group of men with the weapon, and commanded, "You men come, too." She marched them to the spot where Drury was concealed, and pointed to him and snarled, "Get him out!"

The men tested their strength here and there without promise of success.

One group started a heap of wheels to slewing downward and Crosson shouted to them to stop. An inch more, and they would have buried Drury from sight or hope.

One man wormed through somehow and caught Drury by the hand, but the first tug brought from him such a wail of anguish that the man fell back. He could not budge the body clamped with steel. He could only wrench it. So he came away.

"There's nothing for me to do, Reny," the doctor faltered, and, choked with pity for her and her lover and the helplessness of mankind, he turned away, and she let him go. The gun fell to the ground.

The other men left the place. One of them said that the wrecking-crew would be along with a derrick in a few hours.

"A few hours!" Irene whimpered.

She leaned against the lattice that kept her from the bridegroom and tried to tell him to be brave. But he had heard his sentence, and with his last hope went what little courage he had ever had.

He began to plead and protest and weep. He gave voice to all the voices of pain, the myriad voices from every tormented particle of him.

Irene knelt down and twisted through the crevice to where she could hold his hand. But he s.n.a.t.c.hed it away, babbling: "Don't touch me! Don't touch me!"

Crosson stayed near, dreading lest Irene's skirts should catch fire.

Twice he beat them out with his hands. She had not noticed that they were aflame. She was murmuring love-words of odious vanity to one who almost forgot her existence, centered in the glowing sphere of his own h.e.l.l.

Drury rolled and panted and gibbered, cursed even, with lips more used to gentle words and prayers. He prayed, too, but with sacrilege:

"O Lord, spare me this. O G.o.d, have a little mercy. Send rain, send help, lift this mountain from me just till I can breathe. O G.o.d, if You have any mercy in Your heart--but no, no--no, no, You let Your own Son hang on the cross, didn't You? He asked You why You had deserted Him, and You didn't answer, did You?"

Crosson looked up to see a thunderbolt split the dark sky, but the stars were agleam now, twinkling about the moon's serenity.

Irene put her fingers across Drury's lips to hush his blasphemy. She tore her face with her nails, and tried for his sake to stifle the sobs that smote through her.

By and by Drury's voice grew hoa.r.s.e, and he whispered. She bent close and heard. She called to Crosson:

"Run get the doctor to give him something--some morphine or something--quick. Every second is agony for my poor boy."

Crosson ran to the doctor. He stood among writhing bodies and shook his head dismally. He was saying as Crosson came up:

"I'm sorry, I'm awful sorry, folks, but the last grain of morphine is gone. The drug-stores haven't got any more. We've telegraphed to the next town. You'll just have to stand it."

Crosson went back slowly with that heavy burden of news. He whispered it to Irene, but Drury heard him, and a shriek of despair went from him like a flash of fire. New blazes sprang up with an impish merriment.

Crosson, fearing for Irene's safety, fought at them with earth and with water that boys fetched from distances, and at last extinguished the immediate fire.

The bystanders worked elsewhere, but Crosson lingered to protect Irene.

In the dark he could hear Drury whispering something to her.

He pleaded, wheedled, kissed her hand, mumbled it like a dog, reasoned with her insanely, while she trembled all over, a s.h.i.+vering leaf on a blown twig.

Crosson could hear occasional phrases: "If you love me, you will--if you love me, Reny. What do you want me to suffer for, honey? You don't want me just to suffer--just to suffer, do you--you don't, do you? Reny honey, Reny? You say you love me, and you won't do the thing that will help me. You don't love me. That's it, you don't really love me!"

She turned to Crosson at last and moaned: "He wants me to kill him! What can I do? Oh, what is there to do?"

Crosson could not bear to look in her eyes. He could not bear the sound of Drury's voice. He could not even debate that problem. He was cravenly glad when somebody's hand seized him and a rough voice called him away to other toil. He slunk off.

There were miseries enough wherever he went, but they were the miseries of strangers. He could not forget Irene and the riddle of duty that was hers. He avoided the spot where she was closeted with grief, and worked remote in the glimmer from bonfires lighted in the fields alongside.

The fire in the wreck was out now, save that here and there little blazes appeared, only to be quenched at once. But smoldering timbers crackled like rifle-shots, and there were thunderous slidings of wreckage.

Irene's mother and father had stood off at a distance for a long time, but at length they missed Irene and came over to question Crosson. He knew that Irene would not wish them present at such obsequies, and he told them she had gone home.

After a time, curiosity nagged him into approaching her hiding-place. He listened, and there was no sound. He peered in and dimly descried Drury.

He was not moving; he might have been asleep. Irene might have been asleep, too, for she lay huddled up in what s.p.a.ce there was.

Crosson knelt down and crawled in. She was unconscious. He touched Drury with a dreading hand, which drew quickly back as from a contact with ice.

A kind of panic seized Crosson. He backed out quickly and dragged Irene away with him in awkward desperation.

As her body came forth, his gun came too. He thought it had lain outside. He caught it and broke it at the breech, ejecting the two sh.e.l.ls; one of them was empty. He threw it into the wreck and pocketed the other sh.e.l.l and tossed the gun under a stack of wreckage.

He was trying to revive Irene when her father and mother came back anxiously to say that she was not at home. Her mother dropped down at her side.

Crosson left Irene with her own people. He did not want to see her or hear her when she came back to this miserable world. He did not want her even to know what he knew.

III

Crosson had tried afterward to forget. It had been hard at first, but in time he had forgotten. He had gone to a theological school and learned to chide people for their complaints and to administer well-phrased anodynes. During his vacations he had avoided Irene. When he had been graduated he had been first pulpited in a far-off city.

Years afterward he had been invited to supply an empty pulpit in his home town. He had not succeeded with life. He lacked the flame or the luck or the tact--something. He had come back to the place he started from. He had renewed old acquaintances, laughed over the ancient jokes, and said he was sorry for those who had had misfortune. When he met Irene Straley he hardly recalled his love, except to smile at it as a boyish whim. He had forgotten the pangs of that as one forgets almost all his yester aches. He had forgotten the pains he had seen others suffer, even more easily than he forgot his own.

To-day his sermon on the triviality of bodily discomfort had flung Irene Straley back into the caldron of that old torment. She had made that silent protest against the iniquitous cruelty of his preachment. She had dragged him backward into the living presence of his past.

She had not forgotten. She had been faithful to Drury Boldin while he was working in a distant city. She was faithful to him still in that Farthest Country. She had the genius of remembrance.

These were Doctor Crosson's ulterior thoughts while he harangued his flock visibly and audibly. His thoughts had not needed the time their telling requires. They gave him back his scenes in pictures, not in words; in heartaches and heartbreaks and terrors and longings, not in limping syllables that mock the vision with their inept.i.tude.

He felt anew what he had felt and seen, and he could not give any verve to the peroration of his sermon. He could not even change it. It had been effective when he had preached it previously. But now he parroted with unconscious irony the phrases he had once so admired. He came to the last word.

"And so, to repeat: How much more bitter, dearly beloved, are the anguishes of the soul than any mere bodily distress! What are the fleeting torments of this tenement of clay, mere bone and flesh, to the soul's despair? Nothing, nothing."

His congregation felt a lack of warmth in his tone. His hand fell limply on the Bible and the sermon was done. The only stir was one of relief at its conclusion.

He gave out the final hymn, and he sat through it while the people dragged it to the end. He gave forth the benediction "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost," and he made short work of the dawdlers who waited to exchange stupidities with him. He took refuge from his congregation in his study, locked the door, and gave himself up to meditation.

Somehow pain had suddenly come to mean more to him than it had yet meant. He had known it, groaned under it, lived it down, and let it go.

He had felt sorry for other people and got rid of their woes as best as he could with the trite expressions in use, and had forgotten whether they were hushed by health or by death.

And so he had let the old-fas.h.i.+oned h.e.l.l go by with other dogmas out of style. He had fas.h.i.+oned a new Hades to frighten people with, that they might not find sin too attractive and imperilous.

Now he was suddenly convinced that if there must be h.e.l.l, it must be such as Dante set to rhyme and the old hard-sh.e.l.l preachers preached: a region where flames sear and demons pluck at the frantic nerves, playing upon them fiendish tunes.

Yet he could not reconcile that h.e.l.l with the G.o.d that made the lilac-bush whose purple cl.u.s.ters shook perfume and little flowers against his window-sill, while the old locust in rivalry bent down and flaunted against the lilacs its pendants of ivory grace and heavenly fragrance.