Four Days | Page 7

do you know, we sat there and talked for
an hour at least about all kinds of sports and athletics. You should have
seen the way he kept tossing the hair out of his eyes and saying, 'Fine,
fine!' And then he'd boast, and tell me all about the things he'd done. I
never saw a fellow built as he was. It seems that he was a champion in
most everything. But after a while he seemed to get on to the fact that
he was losing an awful lot of blood, and then he said again, 'Schade.'
That was all. After two or three foolish tries I got up on my feet. The
last I saw of him he was supporting himself on his arm, looking for all
the world like that statue.
"They'd cleared off all the wounded, and only the dead were left. It was
terribly still, and I could hear him 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