Four Days Part 1

Four Days.

by Hetty Hemenway.

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 mult.i.tudes 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 antic.i.p.ation, 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.

"h.e.l.lo, 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 c.o.c.kade 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 gra.s.s," 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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.

"h.e.l.lo, 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 pa.s.sionately 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 wors.h.i.+pfully in the background.

"Look at 'im! Ain't he grand? Glory be to G.o.d--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 s.h.i.+rt 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, hoa.r.s.ely; "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."