Four Days

Four Days, by Hetty Hemenway,
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Illustrated by Richard Culter
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Title: Four Days The Story of a War Marriage
Author: Hetty Hemenway

Release Date: December 9, 2006 [eBook #20070]
Language: English
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FOUR DAYS
The Story of a War Marriage
by
HETTY HEMENWAY
With Frontispiece by Richard Culter

Boston Little, Brown, and Company Copyright, 1917, Published,
September, 1917 All rights reserved

[Illustration: "If you hear I'm missing, there is still a good chance."]

FOUR DAYS

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