One of Ours - Willa Cather (great book club books .TXT) 📗

on board. I’ll go any length to save this man.”

“That is your own affair, but you will not interfere with me in the discharge of my duties. Will you leave my cabin?”

“In a moment, Steward. I know that last night a number of cases of eggs and oranges were carried into this room. They are here now, and they belong to the A.E.F. If you will agree to provision my man, what I know won’t go any further. But if you refuse, I’ll get this matter investigated. I won’t stop till I do.”

The Steward sat down, and took up a pen. His large, soft hand looked cheesy, like his face. “What is the number of the cabin?” he asked indifferently.

“Ninety-six.”

“Exactly what do you require?”

“One dozen eggs and one dozen oranges every twenty-four hours, to be delivered at any time convenient to you.”

“I will see what I can do.”

The Steward did not look up from his writing pad, and his visitors left as abruptly as they had come.

At about four o’clock every morning, before even the bath stewards were on duty, there was a scratching at Claude’s door, and a covered basket was left there by a messenger who was unwashed, half-naked, with a sacking apron tied round his middle and his hairy chest splashed with flour. He never spoke, had only one eye and an inflamed socket. Claude learned that he was a half-witted brother of the Chief Steward, a potato peeler and dishwasher in the galley.

Four day after their interview with Mr. Micks, when they were at last nearing the end of the voyage, Doctor Trueman detained Claude after medical inspection to tell him that the Chief Steward had come down with the epidemic. “He sent for me last night and asked me to take his case⁠—won’t have anything to do with Chessup. I had to get Chessup’s permission. He seemed very glad to hand the case over to me.”

“Is he very bad?”

“He hasn’t a look-in, and he knows it. Complications; chronic Bright’s disease. It seems he has nine children. I’ll try to get him into a hospital when we make port, but he’ll only live a few days at most. I wonder who’ll get the shillings for all the eggs and oranges he hoarded away. Claude, my boy,” the doctor spoke with sudden energy, “if I ever set foot on land again, I’m going to forget this voyage like a bad dream. When I’m in normal health, I’m a Presbyterian, but just now I feel that even the wicked get worse than they deserve.”

A day came at last when Claude was wakened from sleep by a sense of stillness. He sprang up with a dazed fear that someone had died; but Fanning lay in his berth, breathing quietly.

Something caught his eye through the porthole⁠—a great grey shoulder of land standing up in the pink light of dawn, powerful and strangely still after the distressing instability of the sea. Pale trees and long, low fortifications⁠ ⁠… close grey buildings with red roofs⁠ ⁠… little sailboats bounding seaward⁠ ⁠… up on the cliff a gloomy fortress.

He had always thought of his destination as a country shattered and desolated⁠—“bleeding France”; but he had never seen anything that looked so strong, so self-sufficient, so fixed from the first foundation, as the coast that rose before him. It was like a pillar of eternity. The ocean lay submissive at its feet, and over it was the great meekness of early morning.

This grey wall, unshaken, mighty, was the end of the long preparation, as it was the end of the sea. It was the reason for everything that had happened in his life for the last fifteen months. It was the reason why Tannhauser and the gentle Virginian, and so many others who had set out with him, were never to have any life at all, or even a soldier’s death. They were merely waste in a great enterprise, thrown overboard like rotten ropes. For them this kind release⁠—trees and a still shore and quiet water⁠—was never, never to be. How long would their bodies toss, he wondered, in that inhuman kingdom of darkness and unrest?

He was startled by a weak voice from behind.

“Claude, are we over?”

“Yes, Fanning. We’re over.”

Book V “Bidding the Eagles of the West Fly On” I

At noon that day Claude found himself in a street of little shops, hot and perspiring, utterly confused and turned about. Truck drivers and boys on bell-less bicycles shouted at him indignantly, furiously. He got under the shade of a young plane tree and stood close to the trunk, as if it might protect him. His greatest care, at any rate, was off his hands. With the help of Victor Morse he had hired a taxi for forty francs, taken Fanning to the base hospital, and seen him into the arms of a big orderly from Texas. He came away from the hospital with no idea where he was going⁠—except that he wanted to get to the heart of the city. It seemed, however, to have no heart; only long, stony arteries, full of heat and noise. He was still standing there, under his plane tree, when a group of uncertain, lost-looking brown figures, headed by Sergeant Hicks, came weaving up the street; nine men in nine different attitudes of dejection, each with a long loaf of bread under his arm. They hailed Claude with joy, straightened up, and looked as if now they had found their way! He saw that he must be a plane tree for somebody else.

Sergeant Hicks explained that they had been trudging about the town, looking for cheese. After sixteen days of heavy, tasteless food, cheese was what they all wanted. There was a grocery store up the street, where there seemed to be everything else. He had tried to make the old woman understand by signs.

“Don’t these French people eat cheese, anyhow? What’s their word for it, Lieutenant? I’m damned if I know,