W

E were in the receiving tent of the ambulance, Judith Garing, Doctor Thesiger, and I, when the stretcherbearers brought in the Kennerly boy.

There had come a hush in the battle out beyond us, a silence which, like a pause in music, heightened the terror of the crash it followed. The three of us, worn by watching, taut from long labors, had fallen into languor that was a loosening of overstrung nerves rather than the relaxation of rest. Ned Thesiger smoked cigarettes listlessly and endlessly. Judith, her eyelids drooped, her body sagging into a canvas chair, drew with her index finger pattern after pattern on the white skirt of her uniform. I rolled bandages automatically, using only one groove of my wearied brain for the task, since, as I worked, I tried to pierce the veil which hid from me the thoughts of these two whom I had known all the years of my life, and yet whom I seemed now to know no better than the strangers of the corps. For nearly two years we had worked together, day and night, on the shores of that surging sea of conflict that had swept over France. We had fought, shoulder to shoulder, sometimes in triumph and sometimes in failure, for the spark of life that fluttered in the human wreckage cast in to us by the waves of carnage. Under Judith Garing's guidance, inspired by her courage, by her unflagging zest for success, by her magnificent endurance, we had held to our posts, bending to our tasks with the will of life-guards who fight the truceless ocean. For nearly two years we had plied the oars in a struggle for humanity that should have eliminated from all of us any thought of self; and yet I speculated, as I watched Ned Thesiger's lean fingers striking countless matches and saw Judith Garing's closed eyes, on the strength of that barrier of abnegation. I knew, as did no other in

the ambulance, of the old bond that had once held the surgeon and the artist, and I wondered, as I wrapped the linen bands, if the dimming years had quenched the living flame that had once blazed on their altars of life.

We had grown up, the three of us, in one of the old streets of a middle-aged American town. Our grandfathers had pioneered on the Illinois prairie, and our fathers were reaping the harvest of that sowing when Judith and Ned and I came together in the intimate companionship of children whose people are animated by the same ambitions, the same standards of citizenship, the same code of individual conduct, the same lethargic self-satisfaction of a community's Brahmin caste. It had been Judith who had driven us out from the narrow contentment of our family traditions into highroads that had seemed to be running far asunder until they had suddenly converged into Neuilly. Judith, with her fiery ambitions, her glorious impatience, her blossoming genius in the painting that made her famous, created for us, as well as for herself, a world of vivid action, of wide vision, and of final achievement, a world whose bugle had called us to the firing-lines. Even though it had been chance and not choice that set Ned Thesiger and myself under her direction in the ambulance, none the less it had been Judith's dominant power over us, bridging fifteen years of absence, that had brought us overseas. The old ideals of childhood and youth which the dark-eyed girl had set blazing in our souls in those summer-time evenings of the Mississippi Valley had kindled again to rush me forth from my safe and steady routine of the visiting nurses in Chicago and had sped Doctor Thesiger out from one of the most promising practices in Cleveland.

I doubt if Ned Thesiger would have come to the ambulance, however, had he known that Judith would be there, for he had not seen her since his marriage, and

he had been engaged to marry Judith Garing when he had wed the other girl. His faithlessness, crushing her love and her pride, had flung her out upon a tide where her older ambitions made the only raft. That she had come into the harbor of splendid success in her painting, and that Ned Thesiger's wife had been long dead, made no difference in the fundamental fact that he had failed her when she had believed in him. I remembered, as I studied her quiet face, the Judith of the raging grief whom I had bidden godspeed on the day she sailed to France, fifteen years before. Recalling her declaration that she would cut from her life every desire but her wish to paint, I wondered if the nonchalant friendliness she gave to Doctor Thesiger in her few leisure moments were pose or truth. I looked up from my work to see that Ned was watching her with speculative inquiry.

Judith, unconscious of our scrutiny, moved her head so that the light from the door of the tent fell on her face. The power of her strongly chiselled chin and of her determined mouth had been softened a little by the lines of weariness that her unbelievably long vigils had marked on her countenance. Her hair, which had been glossy-black on the day she had met me at the Gare du Nord two summers back, was gray now, giving its own testimony to the cares she had lifted upon her back when she joined the ambulance. But it was her hands, moving incessantly in the weaving of imaginary designs, which caught my interest and held it. Those hands somehow symbolized Judith Garing.

Long-fingered, short-palmed, with the strength of a man's fist and the delicacy of a woman's touch, they betokened in their very shape the combination of artist and executive which distinguished her work and her personality. Just the sort of hands to make that painting of General Picquard, which she finished just before the war began and which is to hang in the Tate; they were also the tools of a mechanic in their amazing agility. I had seen them hammer and saw in the making of devices for the relief of the suffering men who had come to us from Verdun, from Mons, from the Vosges, from the Somme front. I had seen them lifting

the wounded with a surety and a tenderness that not one of us trained nurses could put into our arms. I had seen them perform so many miracles of skill, so many wonders of strength, that there were times when I could have believed that Judith Garing's hands were holding the cracked world from falling to pieces. Always powerful, they had gained superhuman strength through the months in which they had labored for others. What a masterpiece they would create, at the bidding of Judith's quickened brain, when the war was over!

Judith, looking up suddenly, found our scrutiny upon her. She smiled at Ned almost indifferently and at me. more warmly. "You're as tired as I am, Rhoda," she said. "You'd better rest a bit before night. There's an order for the corps to go forward at sunset, and there'll be only the three of us on duty here all night."

"You need sleep yourself," Ned Thesiger said.

"Oh, I'm all right," she told him. "You'll break down if you're not careful," he warned her.

"I'll hold up," she said, "as long as any one needs me."

"Don't be foolish," he said sharply, tossing away a cigarette. "There are plenty of people who can do at least half the work you're doing. Let them do it, and save yourself."

"For what?" she asked him.

"For your work," he said, "if for nothing else. Don't you know that you're due for a smash when this is over, if you go on as you're doing? Then how will you paint?”

"I wasn't thinking of my painting," she said.

He looked at her with a curiosity that had something of expectancy in it. I rose to go, spurred by the thought that they might, in my absence, come to a readjustment more vital than this casual acceptance of their proximity; but there fell on the canvas of the tent the shadows of the harbingers of death, the stretcherbearers. An instant afterward they had lifted the Kennerly, boy to the table, and the three of us were standing beside his quivering, broken body.

We had known the Kennerly boy. He

had been one of the first and one of the pampered patients of the ambulance back in the days when we had thought that the war was to be a clean, swift conflict. He had come to us only slightly wounded, but lingered through a convalescence that might have been perpetual but for his own desire to get back to the trenches. For he had carried in his kit the endearing gift of a blithe cheerfulness that buoyed him and us through the darkening days. Not even the rollicking humor of Lyster of the fusileers, nor the daring mirth of our own American, Winston, who had been wounded at Festubert with the Canadians and who had managed to have himself sent to us, could equal the quiet gayety of the Kennerly boy. He was one of those fair-haired, blue-eyed Canadians who seem to have been cast into a mould for their making, but he was distinguishable from the mass of them by that high serenity of purpose that would have marked him anywhere. He was unusual in many ways for a boy, keenly appreciative of art and literature, eager to talk about beauty, sensitive to every kindness shown him, and radiating an aura of spirituality which was my introduction to the possible ennobling influence of war. Judith and I had become more than ordinarily interested in him during the time he had been with us. Ned Thesiger was, I think, the only one around the ambulance who failed to respond to young Kennerly's remarkable charm.

It was Ned Thesiger, however, who was leaning over the boy now, listening with sensitized ear to the flutter of his heart, probing with skilled fingers around the surface of the wound. He shook his head ominously in answer to Judith's unspoken but insistent question, then ordered the bearers to carry the boy to one of the hospital tents. I started to follow them, but Judith intercepted me. "I'll take care of him," she said.

"You can't," said Ned Thesiger. "You're all in. I've been watching you this afternoon, and you can't go through with this. Put her to bed, Rhoda," he ordered me.

Judith laughed, not gayly, as had once been her wont, but almost drearily. "Don't be silly," she said. "Rhoda will have enough to do to-night when the

others go. And what does it matter, anyhow?"

"It matters very much," he said, "to me."

She gave him a look at that which brought a flush to his tanned cheeks. Then she went out after the men who were carrying young Kennerly. Ned turned to me. "Haven't you any influence with her?" he demanded. "Can't you see that she is killing herself?" "How can I stop her?"

"I'm going to," he declared. "I'm going to ask the chief to send her away." "Where?"

"Back home-to the States."
"She won't go."

"She'll have to. If the chief gives the order the government will enforce it, for her own good."

"She'll never forgive you."

"Even if she doesn't," he said slowly, "I'm going ahead. I owe Judith something. And if I didn't I couldn't see her killing herself without doing what I could to stop her. I suppose,' " he went on, pausing to strike a match, then flinging it away without lighting his cigarette," that you think I'm saving her for myself. I wish I were, Rhoda. But I know, exactly, what Judith thinks of me. No, I'm trying to save her for the thing that has come to be, that will always be, the greatest thing in the world for her, her painting. Won't you help me?"

I thought of Judith's studio with its wonderful half-finished paintings yearning the completion that their inspiration deserved. I thought of the portrait of the old general which had already proven to the critics what Judith could do. I thought of Judith's own splendidly soaring ambition, her dominant desire to make herself the greatest painter of our times. But, even more than these, I thought of the gratitude she must feel in those coming years to Ned Thesiger for the consideration of her welfare that led him now to brook her displeasure. Whether or not Judith cared for him, the realization of his solicitude for her must inevitably soften her ultimate judgment of him. Because I was glad for Judith's sake that the wheel had turned to balance, I gave him the promise.

He hurried me over to the chief's office

before I had time for reconsideration. There, in the shack all littered with papers, and instruments, and piles of linen, and tools, and maps, Ned Thesiger poured out to the crisply alert man who directed us all the tale of Judith Garing's overwork and the immediate necessity of a leave of absence for her.

"But we need her," the chief interposed. "She's been worth a dozen other women. She can even operate in emergencies."

"And she's done the work of twenty every day she's been here. She's never spared herself. She doesn't know how. Why, she's over now with the Kennerly boy when she should be resting. She never trained and she doesn't know how to rest. She'll keep up, yes, under this strain. But the instant the Somme's over she's going to go to pieces. Are you willing to be responsible for that?"

"No," said the chief slowly. "That's not fair to Miss Garing. She's too big a woman to lose to the world through our selfishness. Where's she to go? Paris?" "She'd be back in a week," I told him. "England?"

"She'd be working there in a fortnight."

"Then she goes home." He drew a paper toward him, wrote upon it for a time that seemed endlessly long for him, scrawling his queer handwriting over it, then set it in an envelope, and gave it to Doctor Thesiger. "I'm giving you my right hand," he said, "but justice demands the sacrifice." He smiled at me with that twinkling friendliness that has made our work under him a service of loyal affection. "I think," he said, "that you had better leave to Doctor Thesiger the task of telling Miss Garing."

was the first time I had heard Judith say one word of the oppressing horror in which we lived, and I knew how near to the breaking-point she had come. She was looking down at the wisp of bright hair that had slipped through the boy's bandagings. "Somehow," she went on, "it's worse to see him brought back than it is to have the strangers come in. He's so fine-souled, so high-spirited. He's always reminded me of Watts's Galahad. I'm going to paint some day my memory of him as he stood out there in front of the tent, leaning on his crutch. Do you remember the glory of his face when he told us that he was going back? And now-" She turned from her scrutiny of him to look up at me. "What's it all for?" she cried.

"I don't know," I had to confess.

"It must be for something," she went on insistently. "No scheme of creation can permit this hideous waste without a great purpose. What is it?"

I could only shake my head, and go away, leaving her peering outward over the boy's mangled body. I had intended, as I went, to find Ned Thesiger and send him over to the tent to tell Judith whether or not an operation would be necessary for young Kennerly; but a dozen quick calls diverted me, and the corps was setting out at sunset on their way to the front when I thought of the duty. Then I could not find Ned and I went back to Judith.

"Will they operate?" "Not yet."

"Before they go to the front to-night?" "Perhaps.'

"Isn't it awful, Rhoda?" she said. It

"You will stay with me, won't you, Miss Garing?" he was pleading. “Oh, I know it's irregular to ask for one nurse, but I want you here if. You understand, you see. You know what I mean even when I can't say it."

"I'll stay," said Judith.

He smiled gratitude to her. "I used to think of you often out there," he went on.