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On the Fever Ship
by
Miss Bergen shook her head with great vigor. “Nonsense,” she said, cheerfully. “You are not going to die. As soon as we move you out of this rain, and some food cook–“
“Good God!” cried the young Doctor, savagely. “Do you want to kill him?”
When she spoke, the patient had thrown his arms heavily across his face, and had fallen back, lying rigid on the pillow.
The Doctor led the way across the prostrate bodies, apologizing as he went. “I am sorry I spoke so quickly,” he said, “but he thought you were real. I mean he thought you were some one he really knew–“
“He was just delirious,” said the German nurse, calmly.
The Doctor mixed himself a Scotch and soda and drank it with a single gesture.
“Ugh!” he said to the ward-room. “I feel as though I’d been opening another man’s letters.”
* * * * *
The transport drove through the empty seas with heavy, clumsy upheavals, rolling like a buoy. Having been originally intended for the freight-carrying trade, she had no sympathy with hearts that beat for a sight of their native land, or for lives that counted their remaining minutes by the throbbing of her engines. Occasionally, without apparent reason, she was thrown violently from her course; but it was invariably the case that when her stern went to starboard, something splashed in the water on her port side and drifted past her, until, when it had cleared the blades of her propeller, a voice cried out, and she was swung back on her home-bound track again.
The Lieutenant missed the familiar palms and the tiny block-house; and seeing nothing beyond the iron rails but great wastes of gray water, he decided he was on board a prison-ship, or that he had been strapped to a raft and cast adrift. People came for hours at a time and stood at the foot of his cot, and talked with him and he to them–people he had loved and people he had long forgotten, some of whom he had thought were dead. One of them he could have sworn he had seen buried in a deep trench, and covered with branches of palmetto. He had heard the bugler, with tears choking him, sound “taps”; and with his own hand he had placed the dead man’s campaign hat on the mound of fresh earth above the grave. Yet here he was still alive, and he came with other men of his troop to speak to him; but when he reached out to them they were gone–the real and the unreal, the dead and the living–and even She disappeared whenever he tried to take her hand, and sometimes the hospital steward drove her away.
“Did that young lady say when she was coming back again?” he asked the steward.
“The young lady! What young lady?” asked the steward, wearily.
“The one who has been sitting there,” he answered. He pointed with his gaunt hand at the man in the next cot.
“Oh, that young lady. Yes, she’s coming back. She’s just gone below to fetch you some hardtack.”
The young volunteer in the next cot whined grievously.
“That crazy man gives me the creeps,” he groaned. “He’s always waking me up, and looking at me as though he was going to eat me.”
“Shut your head,” said the steward. “He’s a better crazy man than you’ll ever be with the little sense you’ve got. And he has two Mauser holes in him. Crazy, eh? It’s a damned good thing for you that there was about four thousand of us regulars just as crazy as him, or you’d never seen the top of the hill.”
One morning there was a great commotion on deck, and all the convalescents balanced themselves on the rail, shivering in their pajamas, and pointed one way. The transport was moving swiftly and smoothly through water as flat as a lake, and making a great noise with her steam-whistle. The noise was echoed by many more steam-whistles; and the ghosts of out-bound ships and tugs and excursion steamers ran past her out of the mist and disappeared, saluting joyously. All of the excursion steamers had a heavy list to the side nearest the transport, and the ghosts on them crowded to that rail and waved handkerchiefs and cheered. The fog lifted suddenly, and between the iron rails the Lieutenant saw high green hills on either side of a great harbor. Houses and trees and thousands of masts swept past like a panorama; and beyond was a mirage of three cities, with curling smoke-wreaths and sky-reaching buildings, and a great swinging bridge, and a giant statue of a woman waving a welcome home.