Four Days | Page 3

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,"