Up the brown sod-steps, from the yellow-veiled trenches, out over the lumpy, skirting sand-bags, out into the withered vegetation of Gas Valley, stumbled three figures! Masked figures they were, goggle-eyed, grotesque, with white beaks of tubing which, curving downward from those brown face-masks, pecked in the satchels upon their own breasts!
Forth from the cloud they came, goblin figures, with horrid green spots upon their khaki blouses where the deadly chlorine had preyed on their metal buttons.
And before the petrified girlish gaze one--the middle one--rocked and pitched, like a corroded ship at sea, pitching to windward!
“Oh, somebody is injured--poisoned--g-gassed!”
Sesooā heard Olive’s cry, which pitched like the advancing figure, and forgot completely the informal “kit-inspection” to which she had been subjecting the buxom young woman of the skin and shoulders, who carried a feather muff under the April sky.
“Yes! Some one has got it--was muddle-headed--did not get his mask on quickly enough. Or else something was wrong with his ‘chlorine-fooler.’”
Now it was her brother’s voice, that of the boy-officer, and she realized--hot-hearted little sister--what it would mean to him that, on this day of all days, it should be that:
“The gas came down and caught the blighter slow.”
Poor Blighter! Supported on either side by his comrades, who dragged him along by the arms, he, the stumbling middle man, wildly clutched his khaki breast, as if holding it together--as if keeping it from bursting!
“Lay him on his side, men--feet higher than his head! Remove his mask, and give him air!”
Again it was the young lieutenant who spoke, and, glancing up at him, the girls saw that the silver luck of this long-anticipated day was tarnished in his eyes, as if the villainous chlorine had preyed upon that, too.
Concern was in those eyes, strong concern. Behind it lurked bitter chagrin, only needing a spark to the fire and tow of a hasty temper to ignite it to leaping anger--with a headlong haste to fix the responsibility for the most untimely accident.
But, through it all, he was aware of another responsibility--that of his four girl-guests.
“Stand off!” he ordered them, almost violently. “Get farther to windward. Some of the gas is clinging to his clothing!” This while the two uninjured soldiers were removing the victim’s mask and their own, tossing his aside upon the grass, together with the respirator-satchel to which it was attached (the type of satchel which would by and by hold the purifying carbon made from Camp Fire Girls’ peach-stones and pits), so that the gas, which had somehow penetrated the mask, might leak out.
Supported on either side by his comrades.
“Keep off! Get away--off--to windward! Don’t you--don’t you get it--the whiff of chlorine from his uniform--r-rich smell----”
Her brother was almost beside himself by this time--Sara knew--in his concern over the whole untimely mishap, and his anxiety for his visitors’ safety.
Obediently--loyally--she moved in the direction from which the fresh breeze blew, herself, dragging two of her companions with her.
But one girl, sneezing, choking, with the flame of the Torch Bearer’s emblem upon her hat, striking downward, lighting her cheeks with a counter-fire--one dared to disobey.
“Gas clinging to his clothing! What--do--I care?” she gasped, feeling her own smooth lungs scorched, her sweet breath seared, not only by the unlaid ghost of chlorine gliding by her, but also by a reflection of the torture going on in that poisoned breast upon the grass, where the victim’s blue, pinched nostrils fought desperately for the wavering breath of life.
Blue Heron, Torch Bearer, looked down at him and, on the instant, she went over the top, as brave men do, in the first wave of knowledge--the seasoned wave of training.
“I--I know what to do for him,” she panted on the wings of a gassed sneeze. “I’ve taken an elementary Red Cross course--have talked with nurses who’ve been across. Some--some idea of going over as a nurse’s aid, if father would let me!... Aromatic spirits of ammonia--that would help! Carry it always when I’m off with dad, because--because of his--faint----”
Even as the unfinished sentence tickled her throat like a tainted feather, she was kneeling beside the gassed soldier, plucking wisps from a tiny fleece of cotton-wool in her pin-seal bag, moistening them from a little phial, holding them, one by one, to the laboring nostrils, or chaffing the victim’s right hand, stiffening like a poisoned claw, between her own girlish palms--trying to rub the life back into it.
Her younger Camp Fire Sisters watched her from the position which they had been ordered to take up, a few yards to windward, where the young April breeze, keeping guard over them like a skipping brother, warded off the ghost of gas.
They clasped their hands tensely as they saw her forced to a position behind the sufferer’s head, to windward of his tainted clothing, by the pale, strained officer who forebore to interfere further because the vanishing gas-ghost was too weak for danger--as they beheld her kneeling there, dauntlessly ministering, quailing not before the staggering horrors of the gas sickness--the spewed blood upon the ground.
“Olive! Olive! Look at her! Isn’t she wonderful--wonderful! And she--she was ‘reared in cotton-wool’ herself, as the saying is!” Tears sprang to Sesooā’s eyes. “Nothing but ease and luxury!... ‘Elementary Course!’ Oh, she never jumped to this by fifteen lessons--and talking with nurses!” The voice was the low moaning of a Flame. “Never! She came to it by the long trail, the Camp Fire trail--hiking, climbing, sleeping out on mountain-tops, or by the seashore, having our little accidents, until--until we just forgot that we were we!”
“You forgot that you were you!” echoed the guardian breeze.
“Not one of us--one of us--was a flower-pot plant!”
“True! You weren’t!” corroborated Brother Gust.
“But Iver--Iver! Oh, this is terribly hard for him!” was the Flame’s next moaning outburst. “Besides his sympathy for the poor soldier, he’s feeling bitterly now that there--there goes his reputation for a smart and seasoned company! He--he’s all ready to be splitting mad with somebody. And he has a temper, my brother Iver. Mine’s like it only I don’t--can’t--explode with quite so much force.”
Lieutenant Iver was exploding now, with all the luck of the holiday tarnished in his eyes, his nostrils smoking like a sulphur-candle in his eagerness to nail the blighter who was responsible for the ghastly accident that had, incidentally, withered the flowers of this day of days for him.
“How--how did it happen?” he asked tensely, addressing one of the infantrymen who had dragged the gassed victim up out of the trenches, a tall sergeant--a young sergeant--to whom it had fallen to inspect the gas-masks, to make sure that they were in perfect order, before the men entered the smoky trench-bays.
“Was he muddle-headed--slow about getting his mask on--when the alarm was given--the rattle sprung?”
“No, it didn’t ‘rattle’ him a bit,” the sergeant answered, meeting the question with level eyes. “He had his mask on quicker than I had, sir--properly adjusted, too--was jollying us through it----”
“Then--then the fault must have been yours. Something was wrong with the mask itself! As Gas N. C. O. for to-day, you were detailed to inspect all respirator-masks before the men entered the trenches. I’ll report you for neglect of duty. You’ll be put in the guardhouse for disobedience.... I don’t know how you came by your stripes!”
The lightning-flash of the officer’s eye withered the drab chevron upon the sergeant’s arm.
“Oh, mercy! that Gas N. C. O. (non-commissioned officer) is in for it now. He--he’ll get a ‘skinning.’ Iver’s temper is up. He’s going to ‘bawl him out,’ or, as they say in camp, give him a fearful rating.”
The hands of Iver’s brown-eyed sister clasped and unclasped feverishly as she spoke, hanging on tiptoe upon the skirts of the main group around the convulsed victim.
Her ears were deliriously strained to catch the next words of that figurative “bawling out” in which scorching satire would take the place of shrill sound. They were low, but fiery enough to sear even her, at a distance.
But before the sergeant had been thoroughly “skinned” an interruption occurred. An older man who happened to be passing, hurriedly--anxiously--joined the group.
He wore two silver bars upon each level shoulder.
“Look! Look! He’s Captain Darling--captain of my brother’s company,” panted Sara to her companions.
Captain Darling did a strange thing--a thing which brought the girls’ hearts skipping into their throats--almost with an hysterical impulse to titter--like the light spray on the deep, deep wave when it bursts overwhelmingly.
He strode over to where the sufferer’s gas-mask lay upon the yellow grass--the chlorine-fooler which had failed to fool--put his hand into the breast-satchel attached to it, pulled out and held up--a few burnt matches.
“Ha! I thought so. This--this exonerates the sergeant. No doubt he did make a thorough inspection! Contrary to orders, the man carried matches in his satchel with his mask. The heat down there, on the threshold of the smoke-cloud, ignited them after he entered the trench--they’re warm still. They injured the mask--burned a tiny hole in the face-piece; see!”
The captain held up the goggle-eyed mask, with its brown face-piece, its white celluloid nose-clip and flutter-valve, through which a soldier’s breath and saliva escaped together. Surely enough, there was a tiny, blackened hole, no bigger than a pin’s head, piercing the rubber of that khaki-colored face-piece!
“Oh! Oh! In spite of all this, I’m glad we came to-day. I hardly realized before how much a man’s life in this terrible war depends upon his gas-mask--upon the disinfectants in his satchel through which he breathes! ‘A few peach-stones may save a soldier’s life!’ Didn’t seem possible! But ’twill make the work we girls are asked to do in war-time seem so--so--different!”
The outburst--low and tearful--came from Arline, a rain-streak, not a rainbow, now!
But Sara Davenport was beyond speech. A fiery hand clasped the back of her neck as she glanced from her officer-brother, fiercely biting his lip while he contemplated the charred match-ends, to the “skinned” sergeant--completely vindicated.
“O dear! Iver will feel now that he’s made a fool of himself, that he’s the blighter, for--for going on the storm-path and fiercely scolding that sergeant before he knew that he was to blame,” thought the fiery little sister. “Just--like--me! How often I feel that way after bursting like a hot pepper!... Iver says himself that he has a ‘whiz-bang’ temper, but it’s too bad that he should be caught discharging ‘whiz-bangs’ before Olive. He worships Olive. I guess when he goes over--as he will, oh-h! so soon--when he’s lonely or homesick, lying out in some horrid shell-hole, or rooted in trench-mud until he feels himself sprouting, he’ll be thinking of her, probably as she is now, kneeling by a gassed soldier--true Minute-Girl--no more the Olive Deering that she was when I first knew her, two years ago, than--than.... Oh, for pity’s sake! There--there’s that ‘Old Perfect’ with the muff and skin and shoulders again. I wonder if she heard him pitching into the sergeant, too. Couldn’t! She was too far off. But she’s smiling at those miserable match-ends. What--what an iceberg! If we had her in camp this summer, we wouldn’t need any underground refrigerator.... Ugh! I’d like--to--bite--her!” From which it may be inferred that the little sister was right in her self-arraignment; that there was more than one temper of the whiz-bang order, a flame at this moment upon the sear skirts of Gas Valley.
But there was no flame under the snow-light smile which shed a peculiar whiteness over the face of the detached visitor to camp. Perhaps she was conscious of its frigidity herself, for, curiously enough, she plucked at the corner of her mouth with her right hand, momentarily withdrawn from the feather muff.
The gray-gloved fingers of that hand--forefinger in evidence--described an airy semicircle, a vaguely twirling motion at her smooth, smooth, lip-corner, with the thumb as pivot! But abruptly the whole hand spread itself out to the sunshine, in bland elegance, as “Old Perfect” caught the girlish glance darted, sidelong, towards her, and then dropped to her side.
Really, it was a glance as preoccupied as the gesture itself, for two-thirds of Sara Davenport’s mind was at the moment a storm-zone, swept by concern for her brother and anxiety for the gassed victim who was himself to blame for his misery--and that clouded the other third.
Any point that the movement might have had was blunted against the broad thrill of an arrival from the base hospital of a stretcher for him, seeing that he must not be tucked away in an ambulance as yet, his only hope of recovery being fresh air and the gas-allaying power of Brother Gust.
But, although the troubled eye of the conscious self may be dim and clouded, there is in each of us, young or old, another self forever on the alert--even when he seems to be dreaming. Men name him the Subconscious.
A shy fellow and retiring, he is, nevertheless, an expert photographer, forever snap-shotting things which concern us, although he has a trick of hiding away the films--sometimes for long--until some shock compels him to produce them.
Perhaps he took such a snap-shot now of the elegant young woman whose smile was a snow-blink--like an Arctic reflection--upon the skirts of the yellow sulphur-cloud.
Perhaps, some day, he might, under unusual spur, produce the negative--the indelible negative for a vivid picture of this whole harrowing scene, when, on the brown outskirts of camp:
“The gas came down and bowled the Blighter out.”