Part 17
"i don what i don bekaws of conshunce i suddently cam to fel the orful kurse of drink hav made free to borrow a sale bote will leve same at kee west"
The Colonel drew himself up in his Prince Albert.
"The Sixty-sixth has again split even, sah!" he announced.
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THE NIGHT NURSE
By Will S. Gidley
It was long after the midnight hour in the dimly lighted wards of the field hospital back of the English battle line at Ypres, and pretty, white-capped Nydia, the nurse best beloved by the wounded soldiers--Nydia, with the face of a Madonna and voice as soft and soothing as that of a mother crooning a lullaby to a sleeping babe--was flitting about among the cots, adjusting a bandage or pillow here, and giving a swallow of water or medicine there, and doing everything possible for the comfort of her charges.
There was something of a mystery about Nydia. Nobody knew her history or antecedents. She had appeared at the hospital and proffered her services at a time when they were badly needed, and the medical staff had accepted the offer and set her at work without further questioning or investigation.
From the first Nydia was very popular with the patients to whom she ministered; far more so than she was with the grim-visaged surgeon-general in charge of the field hospital. Said he one day to his assistant:
"This angel-faced nurse we've taken on lately may mean well, but I am afraid she is a bit careless. Altogether too many of her patients are dropping off--er--unexpectedly. I'll have to look into the matter."
Which he did--later on--but that, as Kipling says, is another story.
Return we now to Nydia on her nightly rounds.
She pauses at the cot of a stalwart young English captain who is suffering from a gunshot wound received a few days before, and bends over him with a look of anxious solicitude on her face.
"How is the pain to-night, my captain?" she asks, in a low, sweet voice like a caress.
"Bad, bad," he replies slowly. "But I can stand it, dear, so long as I have you for a nurse. Just think! Only a week since you first came to my cot side, and already I love----"
"Hush! my brave captain," she breaks in on his rhapsody. "You must not think of such things when you are suffering so from your wound. It will be time enough for that to-morrow. To-night you must sleep. I must use the needle to quiet your pain."
"And when I wake to-morrow may I talk to you of love?"
"Yes--when you wake, my captain, you may talk to me of love--_when you wake_!
"Listen, dear," she went on in a whisper so low that only he could hear. "I am going to lull you to sleep with a story--a story of myself." She paused long enough to use the needle and then resumed whispering in his ear:
"Don't interrupt or try to ask questions, my captain; there isn't time for that. In three minutes you will be asleep, and I must talk fast. You, no doubt, believe me to be either French or English. I am neither. I am from beyond the Rhine, a true daughter of the Fatherland. When the war came I had an affianced lover in the German army, a young lieutenant, who had been sent to England on a secret mission. There he was arrested, tried, and executed, as a spy, in the Tower of London.
"Yes, the English shot my lover for a spy! Since that my only thoughts have been of revenge. That is why I am here acting as nurse--and why my patients die!
"The English sent my lover out into the Great Unknown--alone. I will send a thousand English to keep him company! To-day, my captain, you said you would gladly die for me, so I am taking you at your word!
"I have just given you a fatal dose of the hypodermic, and when you wake it will be in another world, with my brave Wilhelm, who was named for the great War Lord. When you meet him, tell him that _I sent you_--and give him my love!
"Ha! ha! Do you hear, my captain? Give him my love; and tell him that each night, Providence permitting, I will send him a new messenger bearing my greetings! That is all. Good-bye, my captain. The end is near. I am going to kiss you now so you may die happy!"
She bent lower over the cot of the dying officer. He had not spoken before during her self-revelation; but now his eyes, filled with horror and loathing, rolled upward to meet hers, and with a final effort he hissed forth the one word--"_Fiend!_"
Nydia smiled--a grim, mirthless smile.
"No, not fiend, my captain--only a German!"
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WHY THE TRENCH WAS LOST
By Charles F. Pietsch
Not two miles away lay his home. Metre by metre, Joffre's "nibbling" had forced the Boches back over the death-sown fields of the Argonne. And now as he sat in his cunningly hidden nest aloft in a treetop, observer for a battery of 75's, his telescope, wandering from the German trenches, brought home so close that he seemed almost to be standing in his own garden.
It was so close, he thought--just over there. And it was so good to be able to watch little Marie playing at the door, and to peep inside into the kitchen where Jeanne was working--or to follow her from room to room as her slim figure flitted past the windows.
He had worried so when "Papa" Joffre's masterly retreat had left her there alone. But this was the fourth day now that he had kept watch over her, and soon, he said to himself with a smile--soon that little home was sure to lie back of the French lines in safety.
The day was quiet. Only intermittently a cannon barked or a rifle spat across the wire entanglements. And all the morning he had sat watching Marie's flaxen tresses bobbing among the rose bushes--and dreaming of when the war ended.
And suddenly the picture changed.
Marie has dropped her dolls and is racing into the kitchen. The door slams. He almost hears the bolt shot to, he thinks. And a squad of Uhlans rides into the yard.
For months past he had driven that picture from his mind. It couldn't be--oh! it couldn't be. And now in sight of home it came in grim reality. So close--and yet as well be at the ends of the earth with that German line between them.
He steadied the telescope in time to see a gun butt smash in the door and the officer stride in. The German batteries opened with a crash. A charge was coming. But he had no eyes for the enemy. He felt, rather than saw, a gray-green wave with a crest of steel flow up from the German trenches and over the "dead man's land." And instinctively he shot orders into the transmitter at his lips.
"Two hundred metres."
"One hundred and seventy-five metres--left."
And as the little puffs of shrapnel began to blossom over the gray-green wave, his gaze swung back to the little cottage.
And then he forgot the Germans--forgot his comrades in the endangered trench--forgot war--everything. For a figure--a woman's figure--struggling--fell past a window in the arms of a uniformed figure.
He thought a scream came to his ears. For one insane second he started down from his station: he must go; he was so close. She needed him. And then as his eyes fell on the struggle below he realized how far it was--how helpless he was. And----
But there was a way. And he began to snap orders into the transmitter.
"One thousand five hundred metres--eight degrees left."
A puff rose on the highway running past his home.
"One thousand six hundred metres."
And a shell exploded at the little stable.
"One thousand six hundred and fifty metres"--he shot another order over the wire--and another--and another--and then:
"Battery, fire!" And with a cry, fell headlong from the treetop as the little home and its tragedy vanished in a whirl of smoke and wreckage.
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THE KING OF THE PLEDGERS
By H. R. R. Hertzberg
The Editor of _Life_, 31 West 17th Street, New York City.
I send this communication to you rather than to the editor of one of the country's daily papers, because your publication is national and even international, instead of being a more or less local one, and also because the sketch of my life it contains, true though it is, has an appearance sufficiently fictional to fit one of your short-story numbers.
My special purpose in wishing to have this autobiographical sketch published is that it may warn and protect a worthy body of men, the Roman Catholic priesthood of the United States, against a class of grafters which preys upon them and of which I was the "King" for nearly ten years.
But, knowing mankind in general, and myself in particular, fairly well, I have no doubt there is another reason for the wish, to wit, that vanity of vanities which compels all crooks, "con"-men, grafters, to brag of their exploits occasionally, and which--through a perverse viewing of viciousness as prowess--causes the most of men to be prouder of their falls from grace than of the good things they have done.
* * * * *
Up to this very day ten years ago I was wealthy and happy. The wealth I had inherited and the happiness I had married. Then my happiness died--with my wife. And, the same evening, my wealth disappeared--with a dishonest manager.
There was nothing left me but our little daughter, a child of eight, and some two thousand dollars. The former I gave into the care of the Dominican Sisters at whose convent, in a small Eastern town, my wife had been educated, and who would, I felt sure, make a true woman and lady of the girl. And the money I also turned over to the nuns, for my child's keep as a boarding-pupil, until she was eighteen.
So I remained alone with my responsibility: the need of providing for my daughter's later future. This purpose simply had to be achieved, and that within ten years--because, when I recovered from the sickness, partly brought about by my wife's death, the doctor, a scientist of note and a close friend, told me frankly that I was afflicted with a disease of the heart which would not let me live no longer than a decade, and this only if I remained as exceptionally temperate as I had always been.
God knows I did my best to obtain honest and fairly remunerative work. My very best. But I failed utterly. And, finally, I came to think of work that was not honest. Grafting began to seem almost a duty, what with my pennilessness and my responsibility. Still, I did not know how to graft, not at all.
A bit of street-corner talk it was that "put me wise." I heard a fellow ask another to have a drink, and I heard the other's answer: "No," said he, "no more of that for mine. I've bin to Father O'Kelly's 'n' took the pledge fer keeps, 'n' the good man's give me five dollars to help the wife 'n' the baby till I c'n git a new job."
"He has taken the pledge and the priest has given him five dollars!" I repeated to myself. And then what poets call an inspiration came to me: there might be money in taking the pledge continually, as a business. First, I smiled at the odd, phantastically sacrilegious conceit. But I grew serious--the Responsibility (yes, it should be spelled with a capital) looming large in my mind's eyes. Soon I was walking rapidly toward the nearest Catholic church and calling for the pastor, a priest whom I did not know and who did not know me. My clothes were rather shabby by this time and I may have looked dissipated, thanks to my several months' incessant "worrying."
And the priest received me, and I took the pledge "before God and His Mother and the whole Court of Heaven"; and the kindly old Father asked me whether I was in need, and, when I stammered a "yes," he gave me a bill and his blessing, and I was again on the street, a successful grafter.
To appreciate the enormity of my self-contempt at that moment you must know that I had steadily been not only what is usually meant by "a gentleman," but, also, a sincere, practical Catholic, while now I was a petty swindler--and a swindler of my Church.
Almost did I return to the priest and tell him the truth. Responsibility appeared, however, and led me away. At a distance from the priest's house I looked at my "thirty pieces of silver" which were a ten-dollar greenback. Then I judged that my appearance--of decent poverty--was an asset of sorts, that the "gentleman-gone-wrong" naturally elicited more sympathy of heart and purse than the commoner bar-room loafer.
Thereafter I became the King of the Pledgers.
Yes, there are many pledgers in the land. Professional pledge-takers, who are also professional drunkards. For Catholic priests are easily imposed on, since they're almost always warm-hearted men and since their faith and their calling render charity, helpfulness, imperative; impel them to extend the benefit of the doubt to every applicant, however worthless-looking, for fear of sinning against charity. Wherefore, even the least plausible pledger is sure to pocket a donation each time he takes the pledge.
The professional pledger must be a traveller, of course. The most of cities can be "worked to a finish" in a week. But there are three, at least, which have kept even the King of the Pledgers, with all his sobriety and diligence, busy for four or five months.
As I have said, I was exceedingly successful. Two weeks ago my bank account, piled up through pledging only, totalled $9,902. With eighty-eight additional dollars I would have enough to purchase for my daughter the annuity--sufficient to keep her comfortable all her life--that was the object of my more than nine years' swindling.
Three times had I visited the little one since I took her to the convent. The last time she was sixteen and a happy, gentle, flower-like girl, gladdeningly and saddeningly like her mother. And I wrote her and heard from her every month.
Well, that day, two weeks ago, when I'd found myself so near my goal, I went out to "work" as usual. My victim was a young priest just ordained, the son of a multi-millionaire, who had given up a brilliant worldly position. I was the first person to whom he administered the pledge. He was moved to the core. And he gave me ... one hundred dollars.
My life work was done.
In almost childlike glee I ran back to my room there to draw the check necessary for the immediate purchase of my girl's annuity. And there I found a letter from the child.
She asked for my fatherly consent--that she might enter the Dominican Sister's Order as a novice. She had a true vocation, said she, had always meant to be a nun. And now that she was eighteen ... "it is my heart's wish, father, dear," were her words. A note from the Mother Superior confirmed her declaration.
Having read, I fell back in my chair and laughed crazily at the joke that was "on me." Then I thanked God for the child. And then I wrote a check for all the money I had, went to my last victim at once, told him everything, handed him my check and his hundred dollars--to spend in charity but not by way of gifts to pledgers, and fell into unconsciousness.
From that hour on I have been dying in a hospital bed. My daughter has received my consent, and the young priest will send her her father's love and last blessing when I am dead, in a day or so. And I shall die in peace.
Very truly yours, The ex-King of the Pledgers.
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A PO-LICE-MAN
By Lincoln Steffens
"Chief," said Mickey Sweeney, police reporter, to the Chief of Police, "my paper wants th' goods to prove whether that red-headed crook, Captain Mahoney, is a crook or an honest man."
The Chief was about to light a cigar. He blew out the match and turned an anxious face to Mickey. Twice the reporter had saved his official life. There was nothing he would not tell him, if he really wanted to know it, nothing. He looked at the boy darkly, then he looked away, off across the humming restaurant, off across the humming years, and the Chief's face cleared.
"Mickey," he said, "when I was young, younger than you, and a green cop, greener than you, I was posted on Sixth Avenue, east side, between Twenty-eighth Street and Thirty-three. The heart of the Tenderloin. And my beat beat with the beat of the blood of it; an th' life; an' th' death. One night, one of my first nights, a fly cabman--one of them nighthawks that picked up drunks to take 'em home and took 'em instead to th' Park and robbed 'em; I wasn't onto th' game then, but because of th' tips they give th' police about other crooks, we let them operate--well, this night-hawk drives up close to th' curb by me, and says:
"'Hey, Bill,' he whispers, hoarse, 'there's murder an' riot in th' Half Shell.'
"I hot-footed to th' oyster house. Empty; not a head in sight. But I listened, and underneath, hell was boiling: yells, curses, thuds. And I piped at th' end of th' counter, a bit back, a trapdoor with th' lid off. I dropped in.
"I come down on them. One of my feet scraped down th' face of some bloke, and he cussed. My other leg got across a feller's shoulder and stuck so I went down on my head, and my hands touched th' murdered body; they was all blood. Which helped me up; that, an' hearing near me a call, low an' quick; 'A cop!' and the chorus singing: 'Kill him!'
"So I come up standin', an' striking out, blind, with th' stick. But I began to look around, careful, to get th' lay. There was one gas-jet, rear. By it I made out th' feller that did th' murder. He was being fought over; some, th' friends o' th' dead man, desirous to kill him: others, his friends, to save him. I made for him. He was at the back, under the light, at th' tip end of th' two twisted strings of crazy-mad fighters. I had to go along between 'em, but that wasn't so hard. In th' surprise of my arrival, the clinch had broke, and that let me pass; that an' my stick on their faces. So I got through, grabbed my man by th' collar of all th' shirts and coats he had on, and I threw him up back o' me onto an old poker table that stood in th' corner.
"So far I enjoyed it, but th' mob rallied. The two fighting sides joined, and all together come for me.
"Ever see a mob mad to murder, Mickey? It scares ye. It's a beast; looks like a beast, smells like a beast. I was scared. I hit out, first with my stick, then when th' mob jammed me against th' table, I hopped up on it and kicked with both legs. An' I floored 'em; lots of 'em. But they come up again, and again, and th' mass of 'em bent me back on th' prisoner. I had to hold him, you see, and he rolled an' pitched an' kicked; that's what give me only one hand. And, by and by, I had only one leg. He--or somebody--drove an oyster knife through my ankle, in between th' tendon an' th' bone, and nailed me to th' table.
"I was done for, I guess. I was hit all over--fists, knives, chairs, legs of tables. I was sore; weak. Mike, I was all in when I seen a red-headed cop dive into th' hole. That's how it looked to me, like a dive head-first. Maybe it was because I noticed first, and so particular, th' red head on that uniform, an' th' red face, an' th' red eyes; and because they looked so good to me.
"'Hold 'em, Brother,' he calls to me, quiet-like an' sure. 'Easy does it.'
"And up he turns on his feet, an' begins to cut a swathe up to me through that mess o' men. It was beautiful. That's when I learned to use a stick right, watchin' him. He held it high, so as when it landed on a head, it come down level, exactly on th' crown. Seems to shoot th' 'lectricity down th' spine, through all th' nerves to all th' joints, plumb to th' toes. He hit no head twice. Every man he fanned closed up like a knife, and click, click, click--slow, regular, nice, he laid 'em down like a corduroy road on which he walked to me.
"His red eyes was looking every which way, and they didn't miss a thing. I saw 'em see th' knife that spiked me to th' table, but they was looking at somethin' else when his left hand pulled that knife, one jerk, and, in the same stroke, drove it into a bloke that was pounding my face, and left it in him.
"'Baby between us,' he says, an' he grabs th' prisoner, yanks him to his feet, and when I, obeying him, took th' other side, he says:
"'Forward, march!'
"And we marched. We stumbled some, an' slipped--off the bodies on th' floor. They was coming to, and moved; and some was getting up; enough to keep our sticks busy. But we marched, us three, like a battalion, to--under the hole.
"'Up we go,' he says to me, and with my good foot in his two hands, he shoots me up and out like a lady mounting a horse in th' Park.
"'Now, you,' he says to th' prisoner, and up th' prisoner came to me.
"And then he turns, belts th' two nearest heads two good last belts, and he bows. 'Gentlemen,' he says to th' mob, 'good-night.'
"He hands me his hand and comes out, closes th' trap-door down careful and stands on th' lid.
"'Now, then,' he says to me, 'you take your baby to th' station; send me th' off-platoon, with th' wagon; and--don't hurry. I like it here. And that old oyster knife left rust in your left ankle. 'Tend to it.'"
The Chief lit the cigar he had been handling as a club. When it was burning perfectly, he said:
"Sweeney, I wish you wouldn't ask me nothing about Mahoney. He's a po-lice-man."
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THE QUEST OF THE V. C.
By A. Byers Fletcher