Four Days Part 3

"That didn't seem very interesting to me. So is everybody else, I thought; and I didn't answer. Presently he said it again, in English: 'I'm dying.'

"'Really?' said I.

"'Yes,' he answered.

"There was something impersonal in his tone, and he looked eery there in the moonlight, I can tell you, leaning on one arm and bleeding. Awfully good-looking chap. Built like a giant. He reminded me of a statue called the Dying Gaul, or something."

"Oh, yes; I know that statue!"

"Well, he looked like that--with all the fight going out of him.

Suddenly he smiled at me.

"'Did you think you were playing your football when you came down on top of me that way, eh?'

"I say, I was a bit surprised. Football doesn't seem a very congenial subject for a dying man; but do you know, we sat there and talked for an hour at least about all kinds of sports and athletics. You should have seen the way he kept tossing the hair out of his eyes and saying, 'Fine, fine!' And then he'd boast, and tell me all about the things he'd done.

I never saw a fellow built as he was. It seems that he was a champion in most everything. But after a while he seemed to get on to the fact that he was losing an awful lot of blood, and then he said again, 'Schade.'

That was all. After two or three foolish tries I got up on my feet. The last I saw of him he was supporting himself on his arm, looking for all the world like that statue.

"They'd cleared off all the wounded, and only the dead were left. It was terribly still, and I could hear him choking, a long way off, as I came back across the lines. The next day I happened to stumble across him. It was bright sunshine, and he was like marble, and the ground all about was sticky. He was staring up in the sun with his head thrown back and his eyes open, and the strangest look! Well, anyway, it made me think of a chap I saw once make a rippingly clever catch at ball, with the sun shining straight in his eyes, while the crowds went wild, and he didn't know what had happened for a minute.--His helmet was still there beside him, keeping guard, sort of like a dog, and I took it back with me. I don't know why."

Leonard paused; then he said, suddenly, averting his eyes like a child caught in a wrong act, "That talk we had was so queer--I mean it was as if--don't you know?--as if we were--well, sort of the same at heart. I mean, of course, if he hadn't been German. War is queer," he continued, lamely, raising his cropped head and looking off at the horizon.

"Awfully queer," he murmured, watching a dark cloud steal across the water, tarnishing all its bright surface.

Presently he spoke again.

"So many men have been killed--Englishmen I mean; almost all the men I went to school with." He started to count as if by rote: "Don and Robert, and Fred Sands, and Steve, and Philip and Sandy." His voice was m.u.f.fled in the sand. "Benjamin Robb and Cyril and Eustis, Rupert and Ted and Fat--good old Fat!"

Lying close to Marjorie on the sand, his mighty young body still hot from the joyous contact of the noonday sun, his eyes, full of an uncomplaining and uncomprehending agony, sought hers; and Marjorie looked dumbly back with a feeling of desolation growing within her as vast and dreary as the gray expanse lapping beside them, for it seemed to her that Leonard was groping, pleading--oh, so silently--for an explanation, an inspiration deeper than anything he had known before--a something immense that would make it all right, this gigantic twentieth-century work of killing; square it with the ideals and ideas that this most enlightened century had given him.

Marjorie strangled a fierce tide of feeling that welled up within her, and her eyes, bent on Leonard, were fierce because she loved him most and she had nothing, nothing to give him. For he had to go back, oh, he had to go back to-morrow, and he hated it so--they all hated it--the best of them! How clearly she saw through the superb, pitiful bluff, that it was all sport, "wonderful"! Wonderful? She knew, but she would never dare let Leonard see that she knew.

And still Leonard counted, his head in his arms: "Arnold and Allen, and Rothwood, and Jim Douglas, and Jack and--Oh, Christ! I can't count them all!" His voice trailed away and was lost in the sand, and the big clouds, spreading out faster and faster, swept over them.

IV

They came up to London in a first-cla.s.s compartment. Any one could have told they were on their honeymoon, for they wore perfectly new clothes, and on their knees between them they balanced a perfectly new tea-basket. They were making tea and sandwiches, and although it was all rather messy, it gave them the illusion of house-keeping. The lumbering local seemed to them to be racing, and the country sped by and vanished as quickly as the fleeting moments, for it was the afternoon of the fourth day. An old lady and gentleman, their only traveling companions, went tactfully to sleep. Leonard glanced warily at them, and turned his back on the flying landscape.

"Marjorie," he said, carefully peeling a hard-boiled egg; "Marjie."

"Yes, Len."

"Were you ever in love before this?"

Marjorie laughed. She was in the mood for laughter. She must be happy and light-hearted. Time enough later on to be serious.

"Sure," she replied gravely, mocking eyes on Leonard. "Weren't you?"

Leonard shook his head. "Just with actresses and things, when I was a kid. Never, really."

"I suppose," said Marjorie, pensively, "I ought to care if you've been bad or not, but I don't."

"But Marjie, darling,"--Leonard brought her back and went straight to his point,--"were you ever really in love with that German chap you spoke of when I gave you the helmet?"

"He was my first love," said Marjorie, with wicked demureness. "I was fifteen and he was eighteen."

"You were just a flapper," said Leonard; "you couldn't be in love."

"A woman is never too young to adore some man," said Marjorie, sagely.

"I was a miserable homesick wretch, spending the winter in a German boarding-school."

"A German school! What for?"

Marjorie, her small face drawn with fatigue, but her eyes vivid with excitement, regarded him pertly.

"In order to learn German--and culture."

Leonard gave a grunt.

"Yes, Len, dear, it was dreadful. You never could have stood it, you're so particular," Marjorie said, settling her head against Leonard's arm.

"The girls only bathed once a year!"

"Dirty beasts!" muttered Leonard. "But what's that got to do with the point?"

"I'm preparing you for that by degrees. Len, dear, it was dreadful. No one spoke a word of English, and I couldn't speak a word of German, and it was such a long winter, and all the flowers and gra.s.s were dead in the garden, and at night a huge walnut tree used to rattle against my window and scare me; and they don't open their windows at night, and I nearly died of suffocation! They think in Germany that the night air is poisonous."

"They don't use it instead of gas. How about the man? Hurry up!"

He looked at his watch, but Marjorie chose to ignore him.

"We've got eleven hours," she said, with tragic contentment; "I'm coming to the man. The girls used to sit about indoors and embroider--oh, everlastingly! Hideous things. I was, oh, so restless! You know how you are at that age."

"I was playing football," said Leonard; "so ought the man to have been, instead of casting sheep's eyes at you."

"He had nice eyes," said Marjorie, pensively, "and lived next door, and," she added, as Leonard puffed stolidly at his pipe, "he was terribly good-looking."

"He was?" said Leonard, raising his eyebrows.

"So tall for his age, and his head always looked as if he were racing against the wind. He was always rumpling his hair as if in a sort of frenzy of energy, and he was awkward and graceful at the same time, like a big puppy who is going to be awfully strong. He was like a big, very young dog. So energetic, it was almost as if he were hungry."

"He's hungry along with the rest of 'em now, I hope," murmured Leonard.

"His name was Carl von Ehnheim. He lived in a very grand house next door," continued Marjorie, "and he used to come over and make formal calls on the pension Muller. He never looked at me, and whenever I spoke he looked down or out of the window, and that's how I knew he liked me."

"Most abominable case of puppy love," said Leonard.