Where the Path Breaks

								

waking into eternity. The breaking of the dream and the pain he had
suffered ought not to seem important. It ought not to matter to a
disembodied spirit. Yet it did matter terribly. Most of all did it
matter that the girl with the smoke-blue eyes and copper-beech hair had
been swept away from him forever. She was somewhere in the world he had
left behind. He did not even know her name, or whether indeed she had
really been in his life. Henceforth he would have to wander through
space and eternity without finding her again.
The man groaned.
"He's coming round at last!" a woman's voice said.
The voice sounded muffled, and far off. It sounded harsh, too. It was
not a sweet voice, and it was not speaking his language. Through the
gray dimness which hung over him like a cloud, trickled this
impression. He wondered why, if the language were not his, he should
understand what the voice said.
"G-erman," he struggled to say, and succeeded with pain in whispering
the word.
Somebody laughed. "He knows he's in German hands!" chuckled the same
voice.
An agony of regret fell upon him like an ice avalanche. He was alive,
then, whoever he was, and there had never been a girl with smoke-blue
eyes and copper-beech hair! She was only a dream. That must be so,
because the words she had said to him were all gone from his mind. He
could no longer remember anything about her except her face--and those
eyes. Those eyes! His interest in past and present abruptly ceased. He
let himself slide away into blank oblivion.

CHAPTER II

Hours or years later he waked up with a start, and stared at the light.
It was daylight, and he was in an immense room. It seemed big enough
for a theater. Perhaps it was a theater. The walls had red panels
painted on them, and on each panel one or two cupids danced and threw
flowers: repulsive, stout cupids. The ceiling was very far up above his
eyes, and there was a dome in the center. From this dome depended a
huge crystal chandelier like a bulbous stalactite. There were a great
many high windows, with panes here and there opened for ventilation.
The windows had no curtains, and the room had no furniture except
beds--beds--endless rows of beds, surely hundreds of beds.
He lay in one of these. All were occupied. He could see heads of men
whose bodies looked extraordinarily flat. On some of the heads were
bandages. Others were shaved, so that they appeared quite bald. They
were very pale heads in the bleak, grayish light filtering dimly
through the high windows. A number of bunks were hidden by screens. He
wished dully that he had this privacy, but his narrow bed had been
given no such protection.
A man was slowly walking down an aisle between rows of narrow cots all
exactly alike. Beside the man, who had a remarkably large head with a
shock of rough, straw-colored hair, was a woman dressed as a nurse. The
newly awakened one knew she was a nurse, though she was not dressed in