Cheerful-By Request Part 11

'Will you meet me to-morrow night? Will you, Buzz?"

"If I'm in this town to-morrow night I'll meet you. Is that good enough?"

He turned and strode away. But she was after him. "Where you goin'

to-morrow?"

"I'm goin' to war, that's where."

"Yes you are!" scoffed Miss Kearney. Then, at his silence: "You didn't go and do a fool thing like that?"

"I sure did."

"When you goin'?"

"To-morrow."

"Well, of all the big b.o.o.bs," sneered Miss Kearney; "what did you go and do that for?"

"Search _me_," said Buzz, dully. "Search _me_."

Then he turned and went on toward home, alone. The Kearney girl's silly, empty laugh came back to him through the darkness. It might have been called a scornful laugh if the Kearney girl had been capable of any emotion so dignified as scorn.

The family was still up. The door was open to the warm May night. The Werners, in their moments of relaxation, were as unb.u.t.toned and highly _negligee_ as one of those group pictures you see of the Robert Louis Stevenson family. Pa, s.h.i.+rt-sleeved, stocking-footed, asleep in his chair. Ma's dress open at the front. Minnie, in an untidy kimono, sewing.

On this flaccid group Buzz burst, bomb-like. He hung his hat on the hook, wordlessly. The noise he made woke his father, as he had meant that it should. There came a muttered growl from the old man. Buzz leaned against the stairway door, negligently. The eyes of the three were on him.

"Well," he said, "I guess you won't be bothered with me much longer." Ma Werner's head came up sharply at that.

"What you done, Ernie?"

"Enlisted."

"Enlisted--for what?"

"For the war; what do you suppose?"

Ma Werner rose at that, heavily. "Ernie! You never!"

Pa Werner was wide awake now. Out of his memory of the old country, and soldier service there, he put his next question. "Did you sign to it?"

"Yeh."

"When you goin'?"

"To-morrow."

Even Pa Werner gasped at that.

In families like the Werners emotion is rarely expressed. But now, because of something in the stricken face and starting eyes of the woman, and the open-mouthed dumbfoundedness of the old man, and the sudden tender fearfulness in the face of the girl; and because, in that moment, all these seemed very safe, and accustomed, and, somehow, dear, Buzz curled his mouth into the sneer of the tough guy and spoke out of the corner of that contorted feature.

"What did you think I was goin' to do? Huh? Stick around here and take dirt from the bunch of you! Nix! I'm through!"

There was nothing dramatic about Buzz's going. He seemed to be whisked away. One moment he was eating his breakfast at an unaccustomed hour, in his best s.h.i.+rt and trousers, his mother, only half understanding even now, standing over him with the coffee pot; the next he was standing with his cheap s.h.i.+ny suitcase in his hand. Then he was waiting on the depot platform, and Hefty Burke, the baggage man, was saying, "Where you goin', Buzz?"

"Goin' to fight the Germans."

Hefty had hooted hoa.r.s.ely: "Ya-a-as you are, you big bluff!"

"Who you callin' a bluff, you baggage-smasher, you! I'm goin' to war, I'm tellin' you."

Hefty, still scoffing, turned away to his work. "Well, then, I guess it's as good as over. Give old Willie a swipe for me, will you?"

"You bet I will. Watch me!"

I think he more than half meant it.

And thus Buzz Werner went to war. He was vague about its locality.

Somewhere in Europe. He was pretty sure it was France. A line from his Fourth Grade geography came back to him. "The French," it had said, "are a gay people, fond of dancing and light wines."

Well, that sounded all right.

The things that happened to Buzz Werner in the next twelve months cannot be detailed here. They would require the s.p.a.ce of what the publishers call a 12-mo volume. Buzz himself could never have told you.

Things happened too swiftly, too concentratedly.

Chicago first. Buzz had never seen Chicago. Now that he saw it, he hardly believed it. His first glimpse of it left him cowering, terrified. The noise, the rush, the glitter, the grimness, the vastness, were like blows upon his defenceless head. They beat the braggadocio and the self-confidence temporarily out of him. But only temporarily.

Then came a camp. A rough, temporary camp compared to which the present cantonments are luxurious. The United States Government took Buzz Werner by the slack of the trousers and the slack of the mind, and, holding him thus, shook him into shape--and into submission. And eventually--though it required months--into an understanding of why that submission was manly, courageous, and fine. But before he learned that he learned many other things. He learned there was little good in saying, "Aw, g'wan!"

to a dapper young lieutenant if they clapped you into the guard-house for saying it. There was little point to throwing down your shovel and refusing to shovel coal if they clapped you into the guard house for doing it; and made you shovel harder than ever when you came out. He learned what it was to rise at dawn and go thud-thud-thudding down a dirt road for endless weary miles. He became an olive-drab unit in an olive-drab village. He learned what it was to wake up in the morning so sore and lame that he felt as if he had been pulled apart, limb from limb, during the night, and never put together again. He stood out with a raw squad in the dirt of No Man's Land between barracks and went through exercises that took hold of his great slack muscles and welded them into whip-cords. And in front of him, facing him, stood a slim, six-foot whipper-snapper of a lieutenant, hatless, coatless, tireless, merciless--a creature whom Buzz at first thought he could snap between thumb and finger--like that!--who made life a h.e.l.l for Buzz Werner.

Until his muscles became used to it.

"One--_two_!--three! One--_two_--three! One--_two_--three!" yelled this person. And, "_In_hale! _Ex_hale! _In_hale! _Ex_hale!" till Buzz's lungs were bursting, his eyes were starting from his head, his chest carried a sledge hammer inside it, his thigh-muscles screamed, and his legs, arms, neck, were no longer parts of him, but horrid useless burdens, detached, yet clinging. He learned what this person meant when he shouted (always with the rising inflection), "Comp'ny! Right! _Whup_!" Buzz whupped with the best of 'em. The whipper-snapper seemed tireless. Long after Buzz felt that another moment of it would kill him the lithe young lieutenant would be leaping about like a faun, and pride kept Buzz going though he wanted to drop with fatigue, and his s.h.i.+rt and hair and face were wet with sweat.

So much for his body. It soon became accustomed to the routine, then hardened. His mind was less pliable. But that, too, was undergoing a change. He found that the topics of conversation that used to interest his little crowd on the street corner in Chippewa were not of much interest, here. There were boys from every part of the great country.

And they talked of the places whence they had come and speculated about the places to which they were going. And Buzz listened and learned.

There was strangely little talk about girls. There usually is when muscles and mind are being driven to the utmost. But he heard men--men as big as he--speak openly of things that he had always sneered at as soft. After one of these conversations he wrote an awkward, but significant scrawl home to his mother.

"Well Ma," he wrote, "I guess maybe you would like to hear a few words from me. Well I like it in the army it is the life for me you bet. I am feeling great how are you all--"

Ma Werner wasted an entire morning showing it around the neighbourhood, and she read and reread it until it was almost pulp.

Six months of this. Buzz Werner was an intelligent machine composed of steel, cord, and iron. I think he had forgotten that the Kearney girl had ever existed. One day, after three months of camp life, the man in the next cot had thrown him a volume of Kipling. Buzz fingered it, disinterestedly. Until that moment Kipling had not existed for Buzz Werner. After that moment he dominated his leisure hours. The Y.M.C.A.

hut had many battered volumes of this writer. Buzz read them all.

The week before Thanksgiving Buzz found himself on his way to New York.

For some reason unexplained to him he was separated from his company in one of the great shake-ups performed for the good of the army. He never saw them again. He was sent straight to a New York camp. When he beheld his new lieutenant his limbs became fluid, and his heart leaped into his throat, and his mouth stood open, and his eyes bulged. It was young Hatton--Harry Hatton--whose aristocratic nose he had punched six months before, in the Hatton Pulp and Paper Mill.

And even as he stared young Hatton fixed him with his eye, and then came over to him and said, "It's all right, Werner."

Buzz Werner could only salute with awkward respect, while with one great gulp his heart slid back into normal place. He had not thought that Hatton was so tall, or so broad-shouldered, or so--