Four Days Part 5

They arrived home late. The family were at dinner.

"We've missed two courses," said Leonard gleefully; "the aunts must be raging."

"Shall I dress up?" said Marjorie.

"Good G.o.d!" answered Leonard, "I go to-morrow at five. Don't wear anything that will make them think we're going to sit round and converse with Aunt Hortense all the evening. I'm going up to say good-bye to the boy."

Marjorie found him there, stretched out on Herbert's little cot, completely covering the little mound under the pink coverlet.

"Don't you come near, Marjorie; I've got Leonard all to myself," cried Herbert, who, like all the others, was jealous of Marjorie, but did not scruple to show it.

"Ha-ha! Who's jealous now?" said Leonard, putting his head down on Herbert's. Marjorie lay down on the quilt at the foot of the bed. Her restless eyes watched a light from the driveway scurry across the bed and zig-zag over the faces of the two brothers. Like a sudden flame struck from a match it lit a metal object on the shelf over the bed. Ah, it looked grim and incongruous in that peaceful English nursery! Once it had been one among a golden sea of helmets, sweeping across a great plain like a river. The sun smote upon gleaming bayonets, pa.s.sing with the eternal regularity of waves. Last autumn the world had shaken under the tread of the feet marching toward Paris.

The light clung to the glittering object, and then scudded away.

Marjorie's eyes kept closing. Suddenly, and oh, so vividly, there came the memory of another garden; the cold, brooding stillness of the winter air, and the sun sifting through the diamond windows of the summer-house, and shining on the dancing letters of the lesson-book and on his yellow hair. Then she heard Leonard's laughter and was back again in the present. How could he laugh like that! It was because he was so young. They were all so young!

"Good night, old man," said Leonard, pulling himself up from Herbert's bed; "don't forget me."

Three times Herbert called him back, and when Leonard returned and stood beside him, the little boy wriggled apologetically.

"Play with me," he said, plaintively.

"Play with you! I'll stand you on your head instead," said Leonard, and put his arm around Marjorie.

But Herbert continued to call to the emptiness.

Leonard and Marjorie paused on the landing, and he reached up and spread his hand over the face of the clock.

"Stop moving!" he said.

"You're just about three years old to-night," said Marjorie.

"I know--I know," he said. Suddenly, with an impulse and gesture of childlike and terrible longing, he put both his arms about Marjorie. His face wore an expression that she could never forget. Looking up at him with wide, tearless eyes, she felt in that one uncontrolled moment that she knew him better than she ever would again. She felt wonderfully old, immeasurably older than Leonard, older than the whole world. With a love almost impersonal in its unconscious motherliness, she yearned with the mighty power of her woman's body and soul to protect this immature and inarticulate being who was faring forth to the peninsula of the "Dead English" to make his silent sacrifice. The great house seemed to be listening, hushed, to the sober ticking of the clock on the landing.

Suddenly, with a preliminary shudder, its melodious voice rang out nine times. The two stole downstairs to the dining-room.

"Nine o'clock. We've missed three courses," whispered Leonard to Marjorie.

All through dinner he sulked. He could not forgive his Aunt Hortense for her very considerable bulk, which was situated between him and Marjorie.

He squeezed his mother's hand under the table, till her rings cut into her flesh, and she had to smile; but toward all the flattering advances of his aunt, and her effort to ascertain his opinion on every aspect of the war, he remained dumb with the maddening, imperturbability of a sulky boy, who refuses to be "pumped."

After dinner he was claimed by his father and remained in the smoking-room, detained by a certain wistfulness in his father's manner.

"We've missed you these four days, old boy," his father said. "But I hardly expect you missed us. Can't we have a talk now?"

"Yes, sir; of course," Leonard answered. He felt suddenly contrite. He noticed for the first time in his life that his father looked old and little, almost wizened, and there was something deferential in his manner toward his big son that smote Leonard. It was as if he were saying, apologetically, "You're the bone and sinew of this country now.

I admire you inordinately, my son. See, I defer to you; but do not treat me too much like a back number." It was apparent even in the way he handed Leonard the cigars.

Desperately conscious of the hands on the clock's face, which kept moving forward, Leonard sat and conversed on the recent drive in France, the Dardanelles campaign, home politics, held simply by the pathos of his father's new manner. At every pause in the conversation he listened for Marjorie's voice in the drawing-room.

And Marjorie, in the drawing-room, was wondering desperately if he knew how the time was flying as he sat there quietly smoking and holding forth endlessly about transports and supplies and appropriations, and all the things which meant nothing to her. More wily than Leonard, she had escaped from Aunt Hortense, who, in true English fashion, had not appeared to be aware of her presence until well on toward the middle of the evening, after the men had left; then she turned to Marjorie suddenly, raising her lorgnette.

"Leonard's letters must have been very interesting to your friends in America."

"Oh, yes," stammered Marjorie; "but he never said very much about the war." She blushed.

"Ah," said the older woman; "I observed he was very silent on the subject. It's a code or custom among his set in the army, you may be sure of that. So many young officers' letters have been published," she continued, turning to Mrs. Leeds. "Lady Alice Fryzel was telling me the other day that she was putting all her son's letters into book form."

Marjorie had an inward vision of Leonard's letters published in book form! She knew them by heart, written from the trenches in pencil on lined paper--"servant paper," Leonard called it. They came in open envelopes unstamped, except with the grim pa.s.sword "war zone." Long, tired letters; short, tired letters, corrected by the censor's red ink, and full of only "our own business," as Leonard said. Sometimes at the end there would be a postscript hastily inserted: "I was in my first real battle to-day. Can't say I enjoyed it." Or, "Ronald Lambert, who was my chum at Eton, never turned up to-night. I feel pretty sick about it." She remembered the postscript of his first letter from the front; not a word about the thunder of the distant cannonading or the long line of returning ambulances that greeted the incoming soldier. It gave the first realistic smack of the filthy business of war. "I've had my head shaved," Leonard wrote. "P.P.S. Caught One." Marjorie wondered how that would look to Aunt Hortense, published in book form.

"Aren't the men a long while?" said Mrs. Leeds, for the fifth time; and Marjorie could endure it no longer. She could not bear to sit there and look at Mrs. Leeds's face. The fierce resignation of the mother's eyes seemed dumbly to accuse Marjorie, whose whole youth and pa.s.sionate being protested: "I won't let her have Leonard this evening--I won't--I can't--it's his last! Why don't old people, like Aunt Hortense, fight wars, if they're so crazy about it?"

She crept unnoticed to the dark alcove, and slipped through the curtains of the French window. But the older woman's shrewd glance followed her; and all the while she was listening with apparent composure and concern to Hortense, she was saying to herself, with bitter impatience,--

"Fool! Why did she have to come this evening!" And then, "O Leonard, is it possible that little young thing can love you as I do!" And, "O Leonard--O Leonard!"

Marjorie, in the garden, skirted the shrubs and stole between the flower-beds to the library window. Vividly she could see Leonard, stretched out in a chair, his cigarette in one hand, gesticulating, talking.

"He's happy; he's forgotten all about me," she thought; and swept by an absurd emotion of self-pity, she kissed her own arms in the darkness to comfort herself, till her eyes, which never left his face, saw him turn warily and desperately to the clock.

"Leonard," she whispered, pressing close to the gla.s.s.

Suddenly he saw her revealed in the pale halo of light cast by the window into the darkness. He looked at her for moments without moving.

Then she saw him get up and say good night to his father, putting his hand awkwardly and self-consciously on his sleeve. Minutes pa.s.sed, and she knew he had gone to say good night to his mother, and then she saw the light of his cigarette coming toward her across the lawn. She waited without moving for him to touch her. So many times she would feel him coming toward her in the moonlight, the outline of his dear form lost in the dusk, and when he put out his hand it would be only empty shadows.

"Marjorie, where are you?"

"Here, Len."

Some one came to the front door and called out,--

"Are you there, Leonard and Marjorie? Lock the door when you come in, Leonard."

From the darkness they saw his mother's form silhouetted against the light inside. She started as if to come toward them, and then suddenly shut the door and left them alone together in the white night.

V

A thick yellow fog lay over London; at five o'clock in the Victoria Station the dawn had not penetrated, and the great globes of electricity in the murky ceiling shed an uncertain light. Through the usual somber and preoccupied din of the early morning traffic, came the steady, rhythmic tread of marching feet. Lost in the smoke and fog, a band was playing "Rule Britannia."

Marjorie and Leonard were standing in the very centre of the vast dingy shed. Heavy-eyed, they looked about them with an unseeing, bewildered gaze, that kept reverting to each other. Marjorie had both her hands about one of Leonard's, and was holding it convulsively in the pocket of his great-coat. Many times she had pictured this last scene to herself, antic.i.p.ating every detail. Even in these nightmares, she had always seen herself, with a sick heart, bearing up bravely for Leonard's sake, making it easier for him.

A hunchback, dodging under the elbows of the crowd, stared at her, and smiled queerly and whispered to himself. Marjie shivered, then forgot him as a spasmodic gasp ran through the crowd; a sound suddenly seemed to envelop her like a wave, breaking, gathering itself, then breaking again--just two words:--"Good-bye--Good-bye--Good-bye."

She looked into Leonard's face, and saw that the moment had arrived; he was going. She was gripped with a sense of suffocation and panic. It was the same feeling that she had experienced as a child when she had gone in wading and had slipped into the water over her head. She clung to Leonard now just as she had clung to her rescuer then.