The Comrade in White | Page 5

seldom out of my thoughts, and at least his dear life was safe. Now I was crushed by the brave, pathetic letter in which he told me that his right leg had been amputated, and that he was lucky to get off so easily. That made me rebellious and very, very bitter. And it was against God that I felt worst--God who had allowed this unthinkable thing to be.
Harry a cripple! Harry of all people! I could not imagine it, nor accept it, nor even face the truth of it. And away at the bottom of my heart lurked the thought that it had been better for himself that he had died in the strength and beauty of his manhood. Why should his spirit be doomed to live on in a ruined home?
Harry is my only brother, and he has been my hero always. Manliness, strength, courage, unselfishness--I know what these things mean; they mean Harry. And of course I was proud when he got his double blue at Cambridge. Cricket and football were more than pastimes to him. He put his heart and soul into them, and when he made 106 not out against Oxford he was as happy as if he had found a new continent. And now the great athlete, the pride of his College, the big clean-limbed giant was a cripple. I could not weep for it, because I could not believe it. I took the thought and flung it from me. And then I picked it up again, and gazed at it with hard, unseeing eyes. It was at that time I stopped praying. What was prayer but a mockery, if Harry was maimed?
Harry was at Cairo, and I could not go to him. And though that made me feel helpless, and almost mad with inaction, yet in my heart I dreaded meeting him, seeing him, taking in the bitterness of it through the eyes. I was a coward, you see, and my love for him a poor thing at the best. But there are some who will understand how I felt, and will forgive me.
His letters were all right, not a word of complaint, for Harry never grumbled, and many a good story of the hospital and its patients and its staff. But there was something else, a kind of gentle seriousness as if life were different now. And I read my own misery into that, and pictured him a man devoured by a secret despair, while he smiled his brave undefeated smile in the face of all the world.
The weeks passed, and I braced myself for the coming ordeal. Then everything came with a rush at the last, and there I was at the docks giving my brave soldier his welcome home. It was not any easier than I expected. I tried my hardest, as you may guess, to be all joy and brightness, but when we were alone in the motor together my eyes were full of tears, and I broke down utterly. Poor Harry, poor Harry, why are physical calamities so awful and so irrevocable?
He let me cry, and then he said suddenly, "Come, Mary, look at the real 'me,' don't bother about that old leg, but look into my face, and tell me what you see. There is something good for you to see if you will look for it."
He said it so strangely that I was myself in a moment, and doing what he told me just as in the good old days before the war. And then I saw that Harry was a new Harry altogether, and that he was radiantly happy. His face was pale and thin, but his eyes were ablaze with something mysterious and wonderful. "Don't ask me anything now," he said; "wait till we are in my old den, and then I will tell you everything." And by this time I was so comforted that I was content to lie back and watch that dear, happy face of his.
I shall never forget the talk we had afterwards. "Mary," he said, in his straight, direct way, "I've come back a better man. I have been all my life a healthy, happy pagan. We were brought up, you and I, on the theory of a healthy mind in a healthy body, and, of course, it's a good theory so far as it goes. But it did for me what it does for many a fellow. It made me forget my soul. Sport did a lot for me, I know, but sport became my world. The life I lived there was wholesome enough, but at the best what a poor, contracted, limited thing is the body, and its joy. And what a big, splendid world I've found the door to now."
"How did it come about, Harry?" I