And so, I confess, it was a surprise to discover that I was dead and yet not dead.
I did not make the discovery at once. There had been a blinding concussion, a moment of darkness, a sensation of falling--falling--into a deep abyss. An indefinite time afterward, I found myself standing dazedly on the hillside, toward the crest of which we had been pressing against the enemy. The thought came that I must have momentarily lost consciousness. Yet now I felt strangely free from physical discomfort.
What had I been doing when that moment of blackness blotted everything out? I had been dominated by a purpose, a flaming desire----
Like a flash, recollection burst upon me, and, with it, a blaze of hatred--not toward the Boche gunners, ensconced in the woods above us, but toward the private enemy I had been about to kill.
It had been the opportunity for which I had waited interminable days and nights. In the open formation, he kept a few paces ahead of me. As we alternately ran forward, then dropped on our bellies and fired, I had watched my chance. No one would suspect, with the dozens who were falling every moment under the merciless fire from the trees beyond, that the bullet which ended Louis Winston’s career came from a comrade’s rifle.
Twice I had taken aim, but withheld my fire--not from indecision, but lest, in my vengeful heat, I might fail to reach a vital spot. When I raised my rifle the third time, he offered a fair target.
God! how I hated him. With fingers itching to speed the steel toward his heart, I forced myself to remain calm--to hold fire for that fragment of a second that would insure careful aim.
Then, as the pressure of my finger tightened against the trigger, came the blinding flash--the moment of blackness.
_II._
I had evidently remained unconscious longer than I realized.
Save for a few figures that lay motionless or squirming in agony on the field, the regiment had passed on, to be lost in the trees at the crest of the hill. With a pang of disappointment, I realized that Louis would be among them.
Involuntarily I started onward, driven still by that impulse of burning hatred, when I heard my name called.
Turning in surprise, I saw a helmeted figure crouching beside something huddled in the tall grass. No second glance was needed to tell me that the huddled something was the body of a soldier. I had eyes only for the man who was bending over him. Fate had been kind to me. It was Louis.
Apparently, in his preoccupation, he had not noticed me. Coolly I raised my rifle and fired.
The result was startling. Louis neither dropped headlong nor looked up at the report. Vaguely I questioned whether there had been a report.
Thwarted, I felt the lust to kill mounting in me with redoubled fury. With rifle upraised, I ran toward him. A terrific swing, and I crashed the stock against his head.
It passed clear through! Louis remained unmoved.
Uncomprehending, snarling, I flung the useless weapon away and fell upon him with bare hands--with fingers that strained to rend and tear and strangle.
Instead of encountering solid flesh and bone, they too passed through him.
Was it a mirage? A dream? Had I gone crazy? Sobered--for a moment forgetful of my fury--I drew back and tried to reduce the thing to reason. Was Louis but a figment of the imagination--a phantom?
My glance fell upon the figure beside which he was sobbing incoherent words of entreaty.
I gave a start, then looked more closely.
The dead man--for there was no question about his condition, with a bloody shrapnel wound in the side of his head--_was myself_!
Gradually the import of this penetrated my consciousness. Then I realized that it was Louis who had called my name--that even now he was sobbing it over and over.
The irony of it struck me at the moment of realization. I was dead--_I_ was the phantom--who had meant to kill Louis!
I looked at my hands, my uniform--I touched my body. Apparently I was as substantial as before the shrapnel buried itself in my head. Yet, when I had tried to grasp Louis, my hand seemed to encompass only space.
_Louis lived, and I was dead!_
The discovery for a time benumbed my feeling toward him. With impersonal curiosity, I saw him close the eyes of the dead man--the man who, somehow or other, had been me. I saw him search the pockets and draw forth a letter I had written only that morning, a letter addressed to----
With a sudden surge of dismay, I darted forward to snatch it from his hands. He should not read that letter!
Again I was reminded of my impalpability.
But Louis did not open the envelope, although it was unsealed. He read the superscription, kissed it, as sobs rent his frame, and thrust the letter inside his khaki jacket.
“Dick! Buddie!” he cried brokenly. “Best pal man ever had--how can I take this news back to her!”
My lips curled. To Louis, I was his pal, his buddie. Not a suspicion of the hate I bore him--had borne him ever since I discovered in him a rival for Velma Roth.
Oh, I had been clever! It was our “unselfish friendship” that endeared us both to her. A sign of jealousy, of ill nature, and I would have forfeited the paradise of her regard that apparently I shared with Louis.
I had never felt secure of my place in that paradise. True, I could always awaken a response in her, but I must put forth effort in order to do so. He held her interest, it seemed, without trying. They were happy with each other and in each other.
Our relations might be expressed by likening her to the water of a placid pool, Louis to the basin that held her, me to the wind that swept over it. By exerting myself, I could agitate the surface of her nature into ripples of pleasurable excitement--could even lash her emotion into a tempest. She responded to the stimulation of my mood, yet, in my absence, settled contentedly into the peaceful comfort of Louis’ steadfast love.
I felt vaguely then--and am certain now, with a broader perspective toward realities--that Velma intuitively recognized Louis as her mate, yet feared to yield herself to him because of my sway over her emotional nature.
When the great war came, we all, I am convinced, felt that it would absolve Velma from the task of choosing between us.
Whether the agony that spoke from the violet depths of her eyes when we said good-by was chiefly for Louis or for me, I could not tell. I doubt if she could have done so. But in my mind was the determination that only one of us should return, and--Louis would not be that one.
Did I feel no repugnance at thought of murdering the man who stood in my way? Very little. I was a savage at heart--a savage in whom desire outweighed anything that might stand in the way of gaining its object. From my point of view, I would have been a fool to pass the opportunity.
Why I should have so hated him--a mere obstacle in my path--I do not know. It may have been due to a prescience of the intangible barrier his blood would always raise between Velma and me--or to a slumbering sense of remorse.
But, speculation aside, here I was, in a state of being that the world calls death, while Louis lived--was free to return home--to claim Velma--to flaunt his possession of all that I held precious.
It was maddening! Must I stand idly by, helpless to prevent this?
_III._
I have wondered, since, how I could remain so long in touch with the objective world--why I did not at once, or very soon, find myself shut off from earthly sights and sounds as those in physical form are shut off from the things beyond.
The matter seems to have been determined by my will. Like weights of lead, envy of Louis and passionate longing for Velma held my feet to the sphere of dense matter.
Vengeful, despairing, I watched beside Louis. When at last he turned away from my body and, with tears streaming from his eyes, began to drag a useless leg toward the trenches we had left, I realized why he had not gone on with the others to the crest of the hill. He, too, was a victim of Boche gunnery.
I walked beside the stretcher-bearers when they had picked him up and were conveying him toward the base hospital. Throughout the weeks that followed I hovered near his cot, watching the doctors as they bound up the lacerated tendons in his thigh, and missing no detail of his battle with the fever.
Over his shoulder I read the first letter he wrote home to Velma, in which he gave a belated account of my death, dwelling upon the glory of my sacrifice.
“_I have often thought that you two were meant for each other_” [he wrote] “_and that if it had not been for fear of hurting me, you would have been his wife long ago. He was the best buddie a man ever had. If only I could have been the one to die!_”
Had I known it, I could have followed this letter across seas--could, in fact, have passed it and, by an exercise of the will, have been at Velma’s side in the twinkling of an eye. But my ignorance of the laws of the new plane was total. All my thoughts were centered upon a problem of entirely different character.