I
With savage pity Marjorie regarded a sobbing girl whose face was
distorted, and whose palsied hands were trying to straighten her veil
and push back stray wisps of hair. Marjorie thought: "What a fool she is
to cry like that! Her nose is red; she's a sight. I can control myself.
I can control myself."
An elderly man with an austere face, standing beside Marjorie, started
to light a cigarette. His hands trembled violently and the match
flickered and went out.
Marjorie's heart was beating so fast that it made her feel sick.
A locomotive shrieked, adding its voice to the roar of traffic at
Victoria Station. There came the pounding hiss of escaping steam. The
crowd pressed close to the rails and peered down the foggy platform. A
train had stopped, and the engine was panting close to the gate-rail. A
few men in khaki were alighting from compartments. In a moment there was
a stamping of many feet, and above the roar and confusion in the station
rose the eager voices of multitudes of boys talking, shouting, calling
to each other.
Marjorie saw Leonard before he saw her. He was walking with three
men--joking, laughing absent-mindedly, while his eyes searched for a
face in the crowd. She waited a moment, hidden, suffocated with
anticipation, her heart turning over and over, until he said a
nonchalant good-bye to his companions, who were pounced upon by eager
relatives. Then she crept up behind and put both her hands about his
wrist.
"Hello, Len."
Joy leaped to his eyes.
"Marjie!"
Impossible to say another word. For seconds they became one of the
speechless couples, standing dumbly in the great dingy station,
unnoticed and unnoticing.
"Where's the carriage?" said Leonard, looking blindly about him.
"Outside, of course, Len."
A crooked man in black livery, with a cockade in his hat, who had been
standing reverently in the background, waddled forward, touching his
hat.
"Well, Burns, how are you? Glad to see you."
"Very well, sir, and thank you, sir. 'Appy, most 'appy to see you back,
sir. Pardon, sir, this way." His old face twitched and his eyes devoured
the young lieutenant.
A footman was standing at the horses' heads, but the big bays, champing
their bits, and scattering foam, crouched away from the tall young
soldier when he put out a careless, intimate hand and patted their
snorting noses. He swaggered a little, for all of a sudden he longed to
put his head on their arching necks and cry.
"You've got the old pair out; I thought they had gone to grass," he said
in his most matter-of-fact tone to the pink-faced footman, who was
hardly more than a child.
"Well, sir, the others were taken by the Government. Madam gave them all
away except Starlight and Ginger Girl. There is only me and Burns and
another boy under military age in the stables now, sir."
Inside the carriage Leonard and Marjorie were suddenly overawed by a
strange, delicious shyness. They looked at each other gravely, like two
children at a party, dumb, exquisitely thrilled. It was ten months ago
that they had said a half-tearful, half-laughing good-bye to each other
on the windy, sunny pier at Hoboken. They had been in love two months,
and engaged two weeks. Leonard was sailing for England to keep a rowing
engagement, but he was to return to America in a month. They were to
have an early autumn wedding. Marjorie chose her wedding-dress and was
busy with her trousseau. She had invited her brides-maids. It was to be
a brilliant, conventional affair--flowers, music, countless young people
dancing under festoons and colored lights. In August the war broke out.
Leonard had been in training and at the front from the first. Marjorie
crossed the precarious ocean, to be in England for his first leave. It
was now May: they were to be married at last.
"Marjie."
"Len."
"I have just four days, you know, darling. That's all I could get. We've
been transferred to the Dardanelles; else I wouldn't have got off at
all."
"Four days," murmured Marjorie. She looked up, and met his eyes, and
stared, and could not look away. "It's a long, long time, four days,"
she said, without knowing what she was saying. All at once she put her
hands over her eyes, and, pressing her head fiercely against Leonard's
arm, she began to cry and to laugh, continuing to repeat, senselessly,
"It's a long, long time."
And Leonard, trembling all over, kissed her on the back of her head,
which was all he could reach.
They drew near to Richmond, the familiar avenues and the cool, trim
lawn, and the great trees. Marjorie's tongue all at once loosened; she
chattered whimsically, like an excited child.
"It's home, home, home, and they're all waiting for us--mater and your
father and all the family. He's been in a perfect state all day, poor
old dear, though he hasn't an idea any one's noticed it. Little
Herbert's the only one that's behaved a bit natural--and old Nannie.
I've been rushing about your room, sitting in all the chairs, and
saying, 'To-night he'll be sitting in this chair; to-night he may be
standing in this very spot before the fire; to-night he may be looking
out of this window.' O, Len, we're to be married at half-past eight, and
we're going in motors so as not to waste any time. I haven't even read
over the marriage service. I haven't the vaguest idea what to do or say.
But what difference does that make! Do you see, Len? Do you see?" She
stopped and squeezed Leonard's hand, for she saw that he was suddenly
speechless. "There they are," lifting the blind, "mother and little
Herbert; and see the servants peeking from the wing."
They swept grandly around the bend in the avenue. The windows of the
great house blazed a welcome. All the sky was mother-of-pearl and
tender. In the air was the tang of spring. In the white light Marjorie
saw Leonard's lips quiver and he frowned. She had a sudden twinge of
jealousy, swallowed up by an immense tenderness.
"There's mother," he said.
"Hello, Len, old boy."
His father was on the steps. Leonard greeted him with the restraint and
the jocose matter-of-factness that exist between men who love each
other. He kissed his mother a little hungrily, just as he had when he
was a small boy back from his first homesick term at Eton, and fluttered
the heart of that frail, austere lady, who had borne this big, strapping
boy--a feat of which she was sedately but passionately proud.
Little Herbert, all clumsiness and fat legs and arms, did a good deal of
hugging and squealing, and Miss Shake, Leonard's old governess, wept
discreetly and worshipfully in the background.
"Look at 'im! Ain't he grand? Glory be to God--bless 'im, my baby!"
cried Irish Nannie, who had suckled this soldier of England; and loudly
she wept, her pride and her joy unrebuked and unashamed.
At the risk of annoying Leonard, they must follow him about, waiting
upon him at tea-time, touching him wistfully, wonderingly, for was it
not himself, their own Leonard, who had come back to them for a few
days? And instead of himself, it might have been just a name,--Leonard
Leeds,--one among a list of hundreds of others; and written opposite
each name one of the three words, _Wounded, Missing, Dead_.
Jealously his own family drew aside and let Marjorie go upstairs with
him alone. She had the first right; she was his bride. Mr. Leeds plucked
little Herbert back by his sailor collar and put his arm through his
wife's. Together they watched the two slender figures ascending the
broad stair-case. Each parent was thinking, "He's hers now, and they're
young. We mustn't be selfish, they have such a short time to be happy
in, poor dears."
"Looks fit, doesn't he?" said the father, cheerfully, patting his wife's
arm. Inwardly he was thinking, "How fortunate no woman can appreciate
all that boy has been through!"
"Do you think so? I thought he looked terribly thin," she answered,
absently. To herself she was saying, "No one--not even his father--will
ever know what that boy has seen and suffered."
Little Herbert, watching with big eyes, suddenly wriggled his hand from
his father's grasp.
"Wait, Leonard, wait for me! I am coming!"
Upstairs old Nannie was officiating. She was struggling with Leonard's
kit, which resembled, she thought, more the rummage box of a gypsy
pedler than the luggage of a gentleman.
The young officer had taken off his great-coat and was standing with his
back to the hearth. He loomed up very big in the demure room, a slender,
boyish figure, still too slim for his shoulder-width and height, clad in
a ragged uniform, a pistol bulging from one hip at his belt. He looked
about him at the bright hangings, with a wandering gaze that reverted to
a spot of sunlight on Marjorie's hair and rested there.
"I'm all spinning round," he said with a puzzled smile, "like a dream."
He continued to stare with dazed, smiling eyes on the sunbeam. His hair
was cropped close like a convict's, which accentuated the leanness of
his face and the taut, rigid lines about his mouth. Under his discolored
uniform, the body was spare almost to the point of emaciation. Through a
rent in his coat, a ragged shirt revealed the bare skin. He looked at it
ruefully, still smiling. "I'm rather a mess, I expect," he said. "Tried
to fix up in the train, but I was too far gone in dirt to succeed much."
Marjorie, with the instinct of a kitten that comforts its master, went
up to him and rubbed her head against the torn arm.
"Don't," he said, hoarsely; "I'm too dirty." He put out a hand, and
softly touched her dress. "Is it pink?" he asked, "or does it only look
so in this light? It feels awfully downy and nice."
She noticed that two of his nails were crushed and discolored, and the
half of one was torn away. She bent down and kissed it, to hide the
tears which were choking her. She felt his eyes on her, and she knew
that look which made her whole being ache with tenderness--that numb,
dazed look. She had seen it before in the eyes of very young soldiers
home on their first leave--mute young eyes that contained the
unutterable secrets of the battlefield, but revealed none. She had seen
them since she came to England, sitting with their elders, gray-haired
fathers who talked war, war, war, while the young tongues--once so
easily braggart--remained speechless.
What had they seen, these silent youngsters--sensitive, joyous children,
whom the present day had nurtured so cleanly and so tenderly? Their
bringing-up had been the complex result of so much enlightened effort.
War, pestilence, famine, slaughter, were only names in a history book to
them. They thought hardship was sport. A blithe summer month had plunged
them into the most terrible war of the scarred old earth. The
battlefields where they had mustered, stunned, but tingling with vigor
and eagerness, were becoming the vast cemeteries of their generation.
The field where lay the young dead was their place in the sun. The still
hospital where lay the maimed was their part in a civilization whose
sincerity they had trusted as little children trust in the perfection of
their parents.
Beside the army of maimed and fallen boys was another shadowy army of
girls in their teens and sweet early twenties--the unclaimed
contemporaries of a buried generation.
There was a fumbling at the door-handle and a small, muffled voice came
from the corridor:--
"I say, Len; I say, Marjorie, can I come in?" And in he walked, spotless
and engaging, in a white sailor suit with baggy long trousers, his hair
still wet from being tortured into corkscrew curls. "I'm all dressed for
the party," he announced; "I'm not going to bed at all to-night."
Marjorie tried to draw him into her lap, but he eluded her with a
resentful wiggle, and walking up to Leonard, whacked him on the thigh
and looked up with a sly, beseeching glance which said, "Whack me back.
You play with me. You notice me. I love you."
His eyes were on a level with Leonard's pistol; he put his little pink
face close to it lovingly, but drew back again, puckering up his small
nose.
"Oh, Leonard, you smell just like a poor man!" he exclaimed.
Leonard grinned. "You never got as near as this to any poor man who is
half as dirty as I am, old dear."
"You've got just half an hour to dress for dinner, and we're due in the
church at eight," said Marjorie.
She paused in the doorway, a slim figure in a crumpled white dress.
Leonard stared at her blankly, and then put out a bony arm and drew her
to his side.
"It's awfully tough on you, honey, to have it this way; no new clothes
or anything fixed up, and," he added, smiling and closing his eyes,
"coming away across the ocean full of dirty little submarines to a
bridegroom smelling like a poor man! Jove! I want a bath!"
"Just as I was about to take the liberty of remarking myself," old
Nannie said. She was standing in the doorway, her arms akimbo and her
sleeves rolled up. "Captain Leeds, it's all ready."
Leonard's arms were still about Marjorie. "Captain Leeds, otherwise
known as Lieutenant Leeds," he said, "once known as Leonard, presents
his compliments to Mrs. Bridget O'Garrity, née Flannagan, and wishes her
to request Mr. Jakes, in the culinary regions, to draw his bath and lay
out his things and generally make himself a nuisance. He will not permit
Mrs. O'Garrity to dress him."
"Oh, now, Captain Leeds--well then, Leonard dearie, you bad boy," wailed
the old woman reproachfully. "Mr. Jakes has gone to the war, as has
likewise all the men in the house, and a good riddance it is, too. There
was a time when you weren't too grand to let your poor old Nannie wait
on you. Why, Miss Marjorie, I remember the time when he couldn't--"
"No reminiscences!" broke in Leonard, eyeing Nannie suspiciously. "You
have had so much experience with men you ought to know how they hate it.
Why, Marjorie, do you realize that Nannie has had five husbands?"
"Oh, Master Leonard, indade, it is only three!" cried Nannie, horrified.
"Seven," Leonard insisted; "it's a compliment. It only shows how
fascinating you are with the polygamous sex. It was seven, only two
never showed up after the wedding. I was to be the eighth, Marjie, only
you came in between us."
"Master Leonard, I could smack you for talking like that! Don't listen
to 'im, Miss Marjorie."
"Cheer up, old Nannie," continued Leonard; "there's still Kitchener.
He's a bachelor and a woman-hater, but then, he's never met you, and
he's even a greater hero than I am."
Nannie, aghast but delighted, advanced toward Leonard, shaking her gray
curls. "H'm, h'm. Woman-haters, you say. I never met one, indade." Then,
very coaxingly, "Didn't you bring your old Nannie a souvenir from the
war?"
"Rather," said Leonard, indicating with his chin the rent on his
shoulder. "How about this?"
"How about that?" said Nannie, her old eyes in their deep furrows
gleaming with malice.
From behind her broad back she drew forth a round metal object that
flashed in the firelight.
"It's a German helmet!" cried Marjorie.
"I want it!" shouted Herbert, stretching up his arms for the flashing
plaything.
"It's mine," coaxed Marjorie, trying to wrest it from Nannie.
Leonard put out a swift hand, and held it aloft by the spike.
"Let me try it on," wheedled Marjorie, coaxing down his arm.
"You look like a baby Valkyrie," said Leonard, placing the helmet on her
head; but he frowned.
Marjorie regarded herself in the mirror.
"This belonged to an officer of the Prussian guard," she said.
"It did. How did you know?"
Marjorie continued to stare at herself in the mirror as if she saw
something there behind her own reflection. "The very first man who was
ever in love with me wore a helmet like this," she said, suddenly,
lifting enigmatic and mischievous eyes to Leonard.
"How many have there been since?" Leonard smiled, lazily.
"I can remember only the first and the last," said Marjorie.
Leonard laughed, but he could not see Marjorie's face. She was standing
looking down at the gold eagle-crest, holding the helmet in both hands,
carefully, timidly, as if it were a loaded weapon that might go off.
"Where did you get it, Len?" she asked, gravely.
"There's a crop of them coming up in France this summer," said Leonard.
"But seriously, Len?"
"Seriously, Marjorie." He took the helmet by the spike and put it on the
mantel. "Lord knows, I'm not presenting that as a token of valor to any
one. It belonged to a poor chap who died on the field the night I was
wounded. My orderly packed it in my kit."
Marjorie drew a deep breath. "Oh, Len," she whispered, staring at the
helmet. "How does it feel to kill a man?"
Leonard, smiling, shifted his position and answered, "No different from
killing your first rabbit, if you don't sit down on the bank and watch
it kick, and write poetry. Besides, you always have the pleasure of
thinking it's a German rabbit."
"Oh, Len!"
"You're just one in a great big machine called England. It isn't your
job to think," Leonard said. "For God's sake, lamb, don't cherish any
fool Yankee pacifist notions. We are going to beat the Germans till
every man Fritz of them is either dead or can't crawl off the field."
His black fingers closed over Marjorie's. "Remember, after to-night
you're an Englishwoman. You can't be a little American mongrel any more;
not until I'm dead, anyway. Now I've got you, I'll never let you go!" He
showed his teeth in a fierce, defiant smile, in which there was pathos.
He knew what a life in the Dardanelles was worth. He put his cropped
head close to Marjorie's. "Do you hate me for that, Marjie?"
Marjorie, pressing against him, felt the strength of his gaunt shoulder
through his coat. A sense of delicious fear stole over her, and the
savage which lies close to the surface in every woman leaped within her.
"I love you for it!" she cried.
"Don't rub your head against my coat," murmured Leonard; "there's bugs
in it."
They both laughed excitedly.