Grendel Walks Again

I

WINTER had slipped away, and its outgoing found us ‘sitting pretty’ on the world’s rim, very secure in Nimiuk. Weather was raw; snow held, though darkened now and moist, unlike the clean and brittle coat of our deep northern winter. The ice was yet unmoved on the great River; summer was yet but the substance of things hoped for. And I, who reveled so in the clear, white, dry cold, found these days dark and uninviting, and so kept within.

Then late one afternoon there came a sharp call at the telephone, a quick voice speaking: —

‘Are you well?’

‘ Yes — certainly. Why? ’

I recognized the voice of Dr. Gregor, the little Scots health officer, whom I knew slightly. I was frankly curious, but had not long to wait, for his amazing message came almost gaspingly swift, as from a man spent with running.

‘Report at the basement of the Catholic Church at six. You are to take charge, as night nurse, of our emergency hospital there.’

‘But — why — what has happened?’

‘It’s come. It’s hit us. In the last three days nine hundred of our thousand here in Nimiuk are down with it. They are sending in fifty men from the creek mines, this afternoon. We will put them in the church, with Dr. Towers in charge. You arc an officer of the Red Cross, and on your feet. I will tell Dr. Towers to look for you at six.

Wear a gauze mask, saturated in weak carbolic.’

‘But, Dr. Gregor, I don’t know a thing about nursing. I’ve never even been in a hospital. I —’

‘There’s death abroad in our camp. I’m nearly single-handed here to meet it. As health officer, I count on you to report for duty.’ And the receiver clicked down.

II

That strange Church of Our Lady seemed a gray and cheerless place, perched on the low bank of the frozen River. Inside, in the half-lighted basement, was pandemonium. Fifty men, on fifty improvised cots, filled the unspacious room. In one sense they were men no longer, but merely terrorstricken children now. For these great husky miners — Scot and Irish, Swede and Dane, Russian and Montenegrin — were, most of them, gigantic bodies who had never known the meaning of a day of sickness. Out of the air had come a brute mysterious Something. It caught and threw them, helpless as in jiujitsu grip; it held them there, not only weak and fevered and depressed in mind, but crowded with a panic terror of this Unknown, of the oncrowding shadows in this strange dim room where they had been herded, stripped protesting, bathed yet more protesting, and thrust with scanty explanation into strange beds, by strangers who were alien townfolk and who spoke a language literally unknown to many of them.

The first glimpse I had at one scared Montenegrin’s face reflected such real fear that I tore off the safety mask, realizing that, it, at least, must not contribute to the panic horror. With that disfigurement removed, I tried to smile down the man’s fear; for, even in this moment of first entry into that dark crypt which was to prove the scene of so much vigil, I was instinctively agrope for contact. I, too, had known a panic — nothing less — at Dr. Gregor’s sharp imperative summons. I was more than ignorant of any nursing art, innocent of the slightest minim of its technique. All the years of my maturity had been spent in lonely, far, and mountainy places where, so God willed, no sickness ever came. And, while I dimly knew that such things were, they had not been for me or mine.

Surely Dr. Gregor realized my gross incompetence — surely someone could be found, by yet another dusk, to tend them capably. I. would help — oh! I would help until my fingers cracked from weariness. To help would be a joy, if I were not alone responsible.

The harried woman who had been in daytime charge of this improvised pesthouse made a short list of things for me to do; and then, disgustedly, showed how to take a temperature, when I most timorously disclaimed knowledge even of that simple operation. She laid out bottles with strange names, with doses to be given under certain conditions (inwardly I quailed, for how was I to diagnose conditions?), and then she said, ‘Here are the strychnine and the morphine. Give hypodermics, as indicated.’

Strychnine and morphine! Maybe you can say those names without a qualm; but to me they were drugs of deadly and mysterious import. How was a person who had but this moment learned to take a temperature (and never did learn accurately to take a pulse) to use intelligently the hypodermic needle?

‘Where is Dr. Gregor?' I asked.

‘You’ll not see him at all. He has eight hundred patients already — don’t you know that? Dr. Towers has charge here, and he’s left for the night. He said he’d not be called for anything. He thinks he’s coming down with it himself, and I guess he went home to wrap himself around as much old Scotch as his skin can hold. Don’t call him, or he’ll bawl you out. I know him. He said, “Tell her to just get on the best she can. It’s likely that these Serbs and Montenegrins will go quick, anyway.” ’

That was my first — but not my last — encounter with our Dr. Towers.

III

Though I was helpless, I found I had two helpers. One was a Swiss prospector who had volunteered for service — sturdy, phlegmatic, a hard-working chap, who spoke so little English that our necessary conversation had to be carried on in scraps of spoken German and written French. He was quick in pantomime, however; and in the weeks that followed he and I did surely qualify as first-class movie actors, since meanings we could not convey by signs were literally not worth conveying! Adolphe really was a treasure, with no hard menial task ever beneath him or beyond him.

But the real treasure-find was Dick, my ‘first assistant’ — ex-jockey from Kentucky, and professionally most proficient in manipulation of the needle. When I confided to him my dread of those drug names, and use of hypodermic needle, he threw his head back and laughed outright. ‘Why, that’s the one thing I know like the road home!' he cried. ‘There’s lots more to racing, let me tell you, than sitting tight on leather. I can dope or jazz a pony in the dark, and make a neat, clean job of it. I make him win or lose, as pretty! Don’t fret yourself about those needles, ma’am. Just wise up little Dick here to the times you want these Bohunks “shot,” and turn me loose. I ’ll dope the whole blame churchful for you, to the Pope’s own taste. That’s all those names are, ma’am. Nothing to be scared of — just dope and jazz for ponies. I’m your lad who’s got the sure-fire trick to all of ’em.’

And, what is more, he had! I watched with some anxiety, at first, warning him to be careful, and — having had a deal of practical experience myself with horseflesh — fearing that here the well-known five-times formula for everything that’s equine might not be carefully reversed again to human measure. Yet, when I spoke of this, Dick looked me strangely in the eye and answered with a quiet finality: ‘Why do you think I came to Nimiuk?’

Dick was not only careful and always cool, but his unshaken realism kept me sane, I think, in those dark nights of mad unreason. And his turfy wit was tonic. Once he had spent a month or so in hospital, laid up there with a broken leg caught in some steeplechase mishap; and being most observant, never fearing to ask questions, he had become a favorite with the internes and had gathered in that catchall head of his the queerest mix of data — which we sorted out together in the long night watches, and found most helpful. This little whip of a man, unlearned yet so resourceful, leaving his blue-grass land ‘between two days’ perhaps thus to escape his own pursuant past, was to become to me a symbol of that true efficiency which the North hammers, freezes, somehow stamps, into all those who will endure it, though they be very outcast.

IV

How it was that first night passed, I never could remember. There remained only a confused sense of my intolerable fatigue, of comfort in the abilities — up to their limit — of Adolphe and of Dick; but most of all there underlay my own unlimited and overpowering inefficiency.

And well I knew there was no outside help to turn to. That Dr. Gregor had been forced to give a post of trust to one so utterly incapable was proof enough of the desperate straits to which our little gold camp had already come. The nearest town was sixty miles by river; and that town, as we already knew, thought itself much worse stricken by the influenza than were we. Its heart was gone, and it was crying out to us for help. Only two trails of many hundred miles (both little used in winter, all but impassable in spring) led to the outside world, and these were over distant ranges which pierced the sky. Not even first-class mail was moving now across that frozen, long, white emptiness. The little coast towns too knew terror, and beyond the coast lay a week’s voyage to any city worth a name, whence help might be expected. And what help was there?

We had a thing we called ‘expecto,’ another something we called ‘hex.’ We had a very limited supply of alcohol, soon to be exhausted; and we had the strychnine and the morphine. ‘One braces, one depresses. Just give a shot, as needed.’ And that was all. Yet fifty useful lives of men dangled upon that needle’s point of sharp oblivion. Oh, why had I not studied medicine — or at least nursing — instead of wasting the good years on histories and psychologies?

That first night had no end, for all the other nights were of a piece with it. When, after multiplied long hours, the day shift finally began to reappear and the woman now in charge said briskly, ‘I’ll look for you again at six,’ I could not actually believe it had been only just one night which now was past since I had seen that little town before, by daylight.

Slowly I dragged great swollen feet of lead the few blocks toward my home. The streets were empty and the houses gray and dark. Here were the homes of friends, yet who of them remained unstrickcn now? I could not stop to ask. I only knew this plague of fear had stalked and caught us, unawares, and I must help to fight it. Yet I could find no cutting weapon to my hand, but only weariness and the too inescapable fact of my own inutility. I slumped down on the edge of the high-built-up sidewalk. Though I could easily see my home, up the street there but a little way, I knew that I could never reach it. The feeling did not frighten me; it just came slowly down, like the invincible screwed application of a great press. No, I could never reach my home.

I do not know how long I sat there. No one passed. Nothing happened, though the day grew larger. Then at last I was aware of something. The sun was now quite high, and something moved; I felt it switch about my feet, and, looking down, saw water. Water was beginning to run in this ditch — water, which these streets had not seen for more than seven months.

If water came, where was our wall of cold, the one sure bastion that we so far knew against these air-blown animalcula? If water came, could spring be far behind its flow? Spring in these latitudes would mean no slow unfolding of green verdure with soft zephyr, but the roar of ice-fed rivers, upheaval of the frost-bound earth, annihilation of all wheelor sledgeborne transportation; and, in those preaviation years, that was all we knew in Nimiuk. It would mean two, or possibly three, weeks of violence, cataclysm, danger, and discomfort, even under the best conditions, plus all of the precarious uncertainty that only those can know who have existed in spring flood time at the incalculable riparian mercy of a great river.

Some think of cold as always hostile, but it can be a friend, a very fortress. It can cover the ugly, purify what’s tainted, cure and cleanse the pestilent unseen. What refuge could I find now for my men (for they were mine, already) if these slight tricklets moving at my feet met with a million million more, and the great River rose at last and broke its ice bands, to pour down over and upon them where they lay, in that lower room so often (almost always, I well knew) submerged in a swift flood of ice-in-water and dead muck when the great River heaved and broke and came destroying, with the spring?

I jerked like any puppet to this string, of thought on what might come. I rose and started on, the new fear overbalancing the old. The River triggerpoised its threat, and I knew all too well the menace of that lethal River.

V

Yet on the second night things went much better. We were getting organized, strung out. The fifty beds began to take on personality and to be charted in my mind, as on my improvised day sheet, with order and some clarity. Obviously, a few were much more seriously ill than others. Somehow we must determine which of our men were on or near to or approaching that unknown danger line, and concentrate our energies on them, trusting that ‘healing power of nature’ I had heard the doctors speak so glibly of to champion those others.

There was still no Dr. Towers in evidence when I returned that second night, at five this time, hoping to catch him by coming early, and press an answer to the lengthy list of questions I had made. The woman in day charge answered my queries wearily — warily, too, when I begged her to tell me which of the men were really sick — ‘very sick, I mean.’

‘They are all very sick, or they’d not be here. Don’t you know that?’ she snapped. ‘And Dr. Towers is just where he was yesterday, and says he’s not to be disturbed to-night, for anything.’

’But, suppose — suppose some one of our men should — in the night, I mean — should —’

I hesitated — a child before that door jarred open into blackness. She was no child, however, but a woman hardened in the rough of gold camps, wise in many ways and far more competent than I, yet made untender by the sharp-edged bitterness of struggle.

‘Are you trying to say “die”? Well, say it! Everybody dies. You’ll come to it, and I will. You can’t sidestep it. 1 tell you, Dr. Towers won’t come back, and won’t answer telephones, no matter what happens. He said to tell you just that. Is that plain? He wants his sleep.’

Still I had faith left in my notion: that some must be in more danger than were others; that we must not spread out our little strength too thin, but concentrate on those in vital need. Since there was no keen, kind physician nigh to give the clue I felt I wanted so, 1 must build up a Doctor Luke from my own memory and imagination. I tried to reconstruct in vision all the physicians 1 had ever known or seen, their bedside manner and their personality. I could remember vividly the family doctor of my childhood, whose breezy entrance always brought relief and joy even before he fairly reached his patient. What secret had he in himself, more rare and precious than the simple drugs he left behind in bottles?

You knew that he was not afraid, no matter what ghost thing might haunt the sick room. And then he made you think of pleasant things. He bucked you up. He made you laugh, if in any way he could, even when you had double mumps and laughing almost killed you. But that was just familiar plain psychology, and not a thing learned only in the clinics. Here, then, were two good firm familiar facts to build upon in all this whirl of strange environment; and Dick’s sane horse sense would, I could see already, prove an invaluable third point of support to base us on what was solid and what was real.

So I shook down the little fever stick with a snap and vim that should have pleased a Red Cross nurse, and as I stuck it under the first tongue of this my second evening I began to tell a yarn. It was the funniest story I could think of, and it concerned a mining claim belonging to a Swede this patient very likely knew. One eye upon the watch hand, I told my anecdote. The man’s face lighted up, and the thermometer was snatched at last from his convulsive gasping mouth as he burst into chortles of good laughter. For years thereafter he could never see me without slapping his great thighs in glee, roaring in recollection of my Swede story, and joking with me about my cruelty in making sick men laugh! But at the time I reasoned, as I left Bed No. 1, ’There’s a patient I’ll not worry about. He has some fever — yes. But he can see a joke — his spirit is a watch; he’ll swing the body part.’

Some of the beds were ghastly, though; no fire of hope struck there. The Irish and the Scotsmen all were splendid, and rose manfully to my poor dangling bait of humor. I got down all the names that night, and with the names a wealth of background color. My stories all depended on the names. No need to tell a verbal slang joke to an Englishman, or joke of any species I could find to Russian or to Serb. These last two proved, through all the weeks, to be our hardest problem. Try as I might, I felt I never reached them, for they were hid behind a barrier which I could never break. Their folk theme was composed in minor key, full of strange intervals, and pitched so low my voice could never compass what was written there, beneath those lines and spaces.

The Scotsmen were my brothers, for I am three parts Caledonian myself. In all the Irish, too, I found a quick response. Not for naught had my greatgrandfather been a Dublin man, and perhaps one such upon a family tree is quite enough. The Irish names went down almost en masse upon my ‘plus list,’ as I called it. The Bryntersons, the Björnsons, and the Stojlbergs were a little harder; responses were less quick, eyes were less promptly kindled. And yet luck played me well here, too; for, though I did not know it at the time, later I learned that Dane and Swede, Finlander and Norwegian, each had taken me for kinswoman, because I chance to be so tall and very blonde. Each in his fashion had responded to that fancied call of race, with the rich clannish loyalty so sensitive in Northmen.

I was far happier now, for I was really doing something: testing a theory with the facts, and it was working. That in itself, while far from scientific medicine, was surely scientific method — wasn’t it? I forced myself to put away the thought that men’s lives hung upon these kindergarten psychologic tricks of ours, assuming courage that we did not have. Surely doctors could not let their minds dwell on the constant agony of being warden to the gates of death. We must do something of the same, in our so ill-equipped nocturnal laboratory.

Events proved that our procedure had some virtue in it. Ten names wenl down upon our ‘minus list’ that night; and it spoke well for the precision of our method that nine of those same ten developed cases of pneumonia before many days, and proved to be our real and serious clinic. The tenth was a blond Swede who lay like Siegfried stricken. He made no move for days and days, he spoke no word at all; and always that slow fever still persisted. Then one night as I rubbed him down with some mite of our precious alcohol (I had worked out a heat-evaporation theory, based on remembrance of desert bottles hung to cool beneath the mess wagon) those pale blue eyes caught mine and he looked up and said the only sentence I recall of all those twenty nights and more in which I tended him: ‘It smells nice.’ Then and there I put this Endstrom on the plus list, and he did recover.

That second night we saw delirium. I did not know it first for what it was, and tried to reason gently with the Serb’s hot and distorted singularity. He must catch a train — he must get up and dress and go. Useless to say there was no train. Useless to say he must not, could not, go. With an unhuman morbid strength he gathered up the draperies of his couch and proceeded then and there to go. Dick and Adolphe could not hold him, though finally we did somehow ram him back into his bed, exhausted. We were worried, desperately, for with all these helpless children to be cared for we could not all three of us stand by through the night and force this mad, hallucinated person to lie quiet.

It was then, in answer to our unvoiced prayer, Saint Gothard came — a tall gaunt French Canadian of few words, great strength, and a way of quiet about him that was better for torn spirits than a dozen strait-jackets or a score of sedatives. The old man just materialized. He had been passing by the Church of Our Lady, so he said, and stopped in to pray, and Father Nunneville had told him of our need.

‘Absolutely, take no further thought to this one. I will attend. He shall rest, as little children rest.’ And looking into that gaunt bearded face of one who in his day had crossed all Canada in the hard train of voyageur, we knew that here indeed was ally. And every night thereafter, about midnight, — that dreaded hour when Grendel walked again, when things began to go all wrong, spirits to darken, feverdriven souls to slip and skid upon the dangerous ledge of consciousness, — Saint Gothard came with his high spiritual assuredness, ins great physical strength, and we all breathed relief. He did in very deed care for mes pauvres petits; and his slow-cadenced French, which sometimes lifted crooning into ancient song or some absurd old nursery rhyme, again and often brought us midnight benediction.

So it was that the daughter of a Calvinistic manse looked out upon this alien discipline; saw it close-ranged, and under fire; saw it so worthy that she almost envied. She saw the old French priest, himself eaten by fever, worn with coughing, refuse past midnight any aid or palliative lest he break his fast of God. Round and pink and kind as she had seen him heretofore, and thought him soft, she lived to find in him a harder mettle than even in her own keen doctrinarians. They became dear friends, and she drew strength from him, even as she fed him close-upto-midnight doses to ease his terrible cough. Yet when he would travel sixty miles, by ice and snow and still more dangerous thaw, to say a service over his lost children who had perished there, he would not listen to her pleading, her all but threat.

‘Father Nunneville — forgive me — but you are an old man, and we need you here, and you need us. Surely there is enough to do in Nimiuk, enough of God’s lost children here—’

‘But I am nothing, and the work is very much,’ he said, and went. We lost him, so.

VI

It was that second night Cardoni came. I don’t know when he first appeared, but I recall seeing him speak with Dick, knowing he watched me curiously out of that dark handsome face of his, so chiseled, metalperfect as a Roman coin. I was not surprised to learn later that he was in very fact by birth a Roman, and had long posed as an artists’ model, until some inexplicable tidal wave had left him, too, high on these northern shores. I wondered at his strange inquiring look, I wondered at his questioning of Dick, I wondered at his sudden leaving; and yet I could not wonder long, for there was so much to be done, and the night hours (though very long, God knew) were never long enough.

Then — I don’t know how much time in between — the Roman stood before me as I was making rounds among the cots. He was but one of many shadows, and I hoped that he was helping Dick. I made to pass him, but he stopped me with a strong but gentle hand upon my arm.

‘Signora!’ He spoke low, a mellow Italian voice that dripped like classic honey on my tired mind. ‘ Signora mia, but when did you cat?’

I sat down suddenly between the shadowy cots, and thought. When had I eaten? Surely not to-day. What was to-day? Was it to-day now, or tomorrow? When had I eaten? I could not remember. And suddenly all of my physical craving, and that weakness which had been so pushed aside and under, came clamoring out. I knew myself a desperately tired woman, and hungry — famished hungry.

‘But come,’he said, taking my hand and drawing me up on my feet, with courtesy that was like the motion of a cinquecento dance, so grave, so gracious, and so full of antique dignity. ‘ But come! ’

I came, wondering, and he led me through and out of shadows in the darkened basement, up a short flight of steps into the little room that was our priest’s refectory. There was a table set for one — a table with white napery, with silver in its proper order, a table with a little pot of posy bravely blooming on its exact centre. I smelled coffee, purring and clucking its happy percolation on the little stove there in the corner. A salad built by sheer artistry, from shreds of edible nothingness, flourished beside the silver. And as I was led to the armchair set in state before that table I caught a glimpse, by eye and nose, of macaroni in the Italian manner simmering on the little heater.

It was too much. I put my head on my two arms, down on that perfect table, and I wept and wept and wept. When that was finished, I wept some more! Simpatico, the Roman seized the proper moment in the storm to place the coffee near, to offer the ambrosial dish; and then stood smiling by, white napkin over arm, ‘to serve Signora.’

Who was he? Even to-day I know but little more about him, though every night thereafter he still came, bringing some delicacy, and served for us a meal at midnight full of such surprises and refreshment that we of ‘the graveyard shift’ looked forward to his coming like children to Kriss Kringle. Later, when convalescents so desperately needed eggs and milk, and eggs and milk were unprocurable, Cardoni brought them every night in a big covered basket. Fresh eggs, I knew, were selling for five dollars a dozen, when you could get them — which I found I could not; and there were precious few fresh cows in the whole country. Whence came the eggs and milk? But when I asked, he merely smiled and looked mysterious.

‘Is it good, the egg, the milk?’

‘Good? Cardoni, they are like gifts from Heaven! They make our boys grow strong, so beautifully.’

‘If the egg, the milk, are from Heaven, then we must speak no more about them.’ And that was all he ever said.

VII

Do not think that in all these busy nights I ever once forgot my fear of that River, which still quite literally hung over us. Our high small basement windows opened flush upon the snowbound earth, and the River always lay there just beyond, biding its time to rise and gulf us. Always it was on my mind, and so, whenever I could snatch a moment, I would rush out from the dark painful building — with its thick and fetid atmosphere of crowded and infected bodies — and run as swiftly as I might across the snow and down the bank and out upon the River, stamping and pounding there and listening to the sound the ice gave back. Would it hold fast for yet another day of grace?

Rushing in from such a swift reconnaissance one night, I found a caller waiting, the little Scotch health officer who had thrust me so abruptly into this spiders web. Haggard as he now was, his coming seemed more precious than visitation of the angels. At once I whipped out pen and notebook and began to fire those many questions at him I had been saving up impatiently for Dr. Towers, who never came.

This fighting Scot just smiled at me. He said, ‘My dear young woman, have you never heard of professional etiquette? I ran in just to see how you, personally, were holding out, because I had detailed you here. Your patients and their problems are Dr. Towers’s — their treatment is entirely in his hands.’

‘ But I have never once laid eyes on Dr. Towers! And he has left word every night not to be called, no matter what might happen.’

‘But he leaves directions.’

‘He leaves us nothing but these scraps of Latin — and very dog-eared drug-store Latin, too.’ I showed him then those wandering notes of scattered words, unrelated tags which, if they held any meaning, were in a form well calculated to conceal it.

‘I’m a desperate woman, Dr. Gregor. One man is very sick to-night, and we have others who get delirious at times. As I told you first, I know absolutely nothing of what should be done. I could follow out directions — yes — but I have had no adequate directions. This affair is no tea party; you said yourself it was a fight. Why don’t you give me weapons, then — answer my questions? You put me here to keep these men alive, I take it. What’s etiquette to that?’

‘Show me your very sick man, then,’ he said, lifting himself up wearily. When we had made the rounds and I had answered several of his queries as best I could, he said, ‘Now listen, for I want you to remember that I have told you nothing; and above all, you will not be following my instructions. But you should know Maclachlan has a bad case of pneumonia; and there are others very probably approaching it. This, if I were in your place, is what I’d do.’

And so I took dictation for nearly half an hour, and called in Dick to listen, too, so that between us we should miss no word or overtone. Never were a physician’s words more hung upon. I spent most of the night’s remainder quilting old woolly undershirts with cotton, for pneumonia jackets. But even that word did not terrify us now, for we had found a friend. On other nights and in those dragging early morning hours we came to dread so, he often came to visit us again, just for a moment’s time. Always he would say, ‘Don’t quote me. I’m not here officially. Forget I said that. Do as you think best.’ But in effect he heartened us immeasurably with his intelligent, shrewd friendliness, his keen, warm interest in our problems of reconvalescence. He was our bank, in our deep gamble with the shadows.

VIII

It was the very first night after Dr. Gregor’s first impromptu visit that Dick came to find me, looking really worried.

‘Have you seen Maclachlan lately?’

‘Not in the last half hour. Why?’

‘Well, there’s something mighty queer on foot there. I don’t get it. He said to me, “This bed of mine has slipped. Will you put something under it?” Well, sir, I looked. The bed was O. K., but just to humor him, for we’re old tillicums, I tinkered underneath and made as how I’d fixed a wedge there. Just now he calls to me again. “You should n’t let my bed drop down this way,” he says. “It’s scandalous. There is a weak place in the floor here. See how the bed goes dropping into it? I’m burnt and sick and tired,” he says. “How can I rest to-night, with my bed dropping out from under me?”’

‘We can move his bed, Dick.'

‘Adolphe and I just did that. It’s what I came to tell you. But there’s more behind this. I wish you’d come and see.’

It may well be that many of our fifty men had families; if so, however, they were still living back on some old-country farmstead, and we knew nothing of them. Maclachlan’s freshfaced wife and little boy I had myself met and remembered well, one time when they had come in from the mines; and so, although I never had seen him before, my sharp anxiety for this man wore a double-cutting edge.

On the hot pillow the man’s hotter head lay rolling, restless, black-gray hair matted to damp curls. As friends, for many wakeful nights, we had been talking of that w ife and son, the creek where he had been out prospecting, his neighbors whom I knew, and all the little daily normal gossip with which I tried so hard to tie these frightened children back to everyday, and be a link with all their known and homely matters of firm fact. But as I came and sat beside Maclachlan’s bed, in its new place, he looked up at me strangely and he said, ‘What is your name?’ I saw then that the man I knew no longer lay there, but another. So I answered, ‘ My name is Mary.’

‘Are you the Mary living in this house?’

‘Yes, I am living here. Tell me what I can do to make you comfortable, so you will get a good night’s rest.'

‘My head is hot.’

We got a relay of fresh pillows and I arranged to keep them airing always in a window. We began to slip the cool ones underneath that feverish head, in endless series. Then after a short time he spoke again.

‘Is Mary there?’

‘I’m here.'

‘Please do not let me drop down so. Can’t you see how I’m slipping? Oh, Mary! I’m afraid! I don’t know what is down there.’

Reaching quickly, from the low bed’s head where I stood, I caught my two hands underneath his armpits and drew him up, until he knew that I was holding tight. ‘You can’t drop any more, for I am holding hard. You know I’m very strong. You can’t slip, now.’ I motioned with my head to Dick and he brought pillows. I knelt upon them at the bed’s head, never relaxing that hard human load. All was quiet, and a long time passed. I whispered up to Dick what he must do of my night’s work. After a time he came and whispered back, ‘ You can’t kneel like that much longer. It’ll most kill you. He seems quieter. Perhaps he’s sleeping. Let him go, easy.’

But the first moment that the tension was the slightest bit released, he cried out, ‘Mary! I am dropping. Please don’t let me go!’

And, as I did so many times again all through that night, I answered, ‘You can’t drop any more, for I am holding fast. You must not be afraid, for I’m right here.’

For hours and hours I held so, hours and hours. Sometimes I spoke, perhaps by some word’s point to break through to the treasury of his will, and help to draw the man’s too fearful soul back from that shelving edge that slipped so close beneath us there, into impenetrable darkness. Again there were deep pools of silence and of crowding dark. Long after, as a murky streak of dawn began to light our lower chamber, Dick woke me, for I had at last fallen asleep, so. I found myself all covered up with blankets, and he had piled big pillows underneath and around me. My arms were dead and useless, my back seemed absolutely broken; but the man apparently slept.

When I came back next evening I looked first to find Maclachlan, but he was not anywhere in the large room. I was frantic until at last, I found him in the little room just off the priest’s refectory — found him waking, gray eyes alight and friendly as they had been before.

‘Hello! ’ he greeted, feebly but with a real show of cheer, in answer to my worried look. ‘They brought me here to-day. They say I’ve passed a sort of turn, and now I will get well. But where were you last night? We boys all missed you.’

‘ Why, I was — I was taking care of a little boy.’

‘I hope the child is better now,’ he said, with a grave interest.

‘He is,’ I answered. ‘Thank you.’

‘Then please don’t go away again. The boys feel better, in the night, when you’re just kind of walking round. It is so — dark.’

That was a sweet cup, and I drank it gladly. God knows I needed the good brace of it. But what was that he said about the shadowed night? Did they, too, know that Grendel walked the hall, seeking to snare some there?

IX

The human mind knows times when shapes, long hidden, force their way across the threshold; and in those long nights of frenzied effort, dark and misshapen fancies crowded into consciousness, like the stir of black-winged bats.

I do not know how much the inner brooding upon our physician’s unnatural desertion of us, the foul air, the fear of the impending River, the continued ever-growing sense of our own weakness, our strength account so daily overdrawn and not recouped, the deep emotional as well as physical fatigue, the spiritual torment of unbearable responsibility which must be ever carried, our loneliness within the night and the late night’s unnatural depression on the mind — how much all these, and more, were ground and basis to the phantom. But of a truth, as surely as I knew myself to be there, I had seen Grendel in that hall; and I could only call the image of the horror I had seen by that grim name.

Surely you remember Grendel, who was God’s savage enemy, accursed monster of all joy bereft who would come nightly from far hollows where he dwelt amid wolf-haunted fen paths, to feast himself upon the blood of thanes who lay asleep in Hrothgar’s hall. By some unholy power he held a spell that turned all man-made weapons. A baneful, horrid, shadow-haunting Grendel seemed to walk among us here, proof too against all human skill to turn his grisly arm, which snatched at sleeping men to do them death-sick hurt; and dire enough our need for mighty hand-grip of an epic Beowulf now, to stay that lethal arm and cleanse our own good hall of this malignant Thing.

As I went ever up and down between those men, — slowly, silently, on measured feet, lest I disturb those sleeping there,— something, Something, hid forever in the shadows, watched its time and waited. Almost, but never quite, I saw it face to face; but slantingly I saw it always, and all the long night long I knew it to be surely there. Ever on padded foot it stalked in grim and shadowed silence to choose its kill, what body next of all our men to put its baleful claw into.

Then one night I returned to duty and was told that Grendel’s claw had reached at last and, despite all our care, had clutched and taken Greenwood, our quiet and courteous old Englishman. That tired, tried prospector had climbed the last dip in the kloof and looked out now on what had always lain behind the ranges, always called there. The day shift merely told us, as they went so wearily away, that Dr. Towers officially had given the death notice, and sometime in the night the undertaker’s men would come.

For a long time I could not bring myself to face the actual fact of it, for I had never looked upon the aspect of the dead. Then finally I forced myself to do so, knowing I could not save my self-respect and at the same time cheat in this last service, useless though it was. So, after all the necessary ministrations to the living, I went alone into the little entryway where they had fetched his cot. I made a light and stood and looked a long time at the thin worn body of the wander-footed Englishman. This, then, was death, which wrote its ‘30’ to the rough draft of our human story.

But who had called it so? This imprimatur had been Dr. Towers’s, that yet unseen practitioner who, in my own distorted loneliness, had come to wear a more malignant mask than even the plague’s self. He called it death — but who was he to name a thing with accuracy? Surely I had not found his word so true in small familiar things that I should take it as inerrant now, in this last ultimatum which mattered so tremendously. The undertaker’s men were coming. Yet, what if Dr. Towers had borne false witness here, as in those other well-remembered countless matters, better not now recalled?

The face that lay upon that pillow was all tinged with blue, the hands upon the cover were ominously quiet. But as I looked, and looked, and looked again — was it the high-swung light which rocked upon its cord in simulated pulse beat? Was it the sharp cool cut of a revivifying night air drawing through the semiheated corridor? Or was it but the shadow of my own refusal to believe that made me know, now, there was life here?

In terror of my almost criminal fancy, yet in a frantic haste, I sought out Dick — my good horse-senseful Dick — and told to him some part of what I felt.

‘Oh, gee! I say — the old he-devil — now, I wonder! Rats! It can’t be!’ But he came quickly back with me to that quiet entryway.

‘Dick,’ I said, ‘do you know any law forbidding “shots” for dead people? If you don’t — if you’ll dare do it — I wish you’d give him, now, just such a shot as you would give a horse to make it win a race. If he is gone, then surely we can do no hurt to what is left here. But if there’s any spark of something flickering, perhaps — just maybe — we could fan it up. No one must ever know, just you and I. But if you do not want to do it, Dick — if you’ll show me how, I’ll do it; and I’ll take the blame, if any comes.’

I think he scarcely heard me speaking, for he was looking so intently at the figure on the bed. Then he went nearer and bent down, and listened long there. He felt about the chest and at the throat, he put his head close to that other’s; and when he did look up his eyes were gleaming.

‘By God, woman, I believe you’re right! There is some sign of breath, or I’m a liar.’ And he ran swiftly for his needles, and the thing he called his ‘jazz box.’

Can you imagine what joy mixed itself with horror when, secretly as friendly ghouls, we sought in the next hours with all our feeble ingenuities to galvanize this once authenticated corpse to life again? There was no visible immediate result to our first efforts, and I, discouraged, said to Dick.

‘ We’ve given all we’ve got.’ But quick as horseflesh he came back with, ’Yes. but thoroughbreds give more than they have got. It’s what a man will ride for. We’re not extended, yet.’ And so through all that length of night we drove our flagging wits with merciless lash, that we, in spite of our gross handicap, might somehow steal from that ghostly rider on the pale horse this race of his so very nearly won.

There came a time when we could sec a motion underneath the cover of Greenwood’s bed. There came a time when we decided we might venture giving drops of milk with alcohol. There came a time when we dared lift the cot and carry it back to the inner room again. And last there came a time when (by God’s favor, late) the grim men with their wicker burden came and knocked, but found the shadowy corridor untenanted and were sent forth with empty hands — to spread a wonder in our Nimiuk, of miracle which came, even in death, to those who sheltered under that gray rooftree. But we who mingled faith and work there knew it for but another twist we’d given Grendel’s savage arm. Next morning as I went off shift I stood again by Greenwood’s cot and looked down at him; but this time he was looking back at me. I forced myself to negligent calm and asked this newly risen Lazarus of ours, ‘What will you have for breakfast?' With a queer huskiness he answered. ‘Ham and eggs I like best.’ Then with apology, ‘I have an asthma, that do give me turns, and all but shut my wind. I think I had one last night. My throat do be almighty tight this morning.’

So Greenwood had come back to us, for keeps; but the night’s work cost us our precious doctor. That pretty story of a miracle did not long outlast the other fancies which the plague had brought. When our clean northern air again blew reason into a healed camp, — after some hand much stronger than our own had held the great and curdled River back, far past its usual break-up, until every last man of all our fifty came up out of that crypt alive and well again, — then laughter was a natural reaction to the talc of Greenwood’s ’death.’ And laughter is the very crudest weapon. Stronger men than Dr. Towers have fled before it.

And we of Nimiuk, who drew deep breath again now that old Grendel walked our hall no more, knew a quite bearable regret when, with the first down-river boat, Dr. Towers quietly pulled up stakes and left us.