Four Days | Page 7

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 muffled 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-class 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,