Four Days Part 2

"I love you for it!" she cried.

"Don't rub your head against my coat," murmured Leonard; "there's bugs in it."

They both laughed excitedly.

II

Two hours later the wedding took place in the church where Leonard had been baptized and confirmed. Little Herbert thought he had never been to such a strange party. He didn't care if he never went to one again. No one was dressed up but himself. His mother and father and Marjorie wore their everyday clothes, but their faces were different. He wouldn't have believed it was a party at all, except for their faces, which wore an expression he a.s.sociated with Christmas and birthdays.

The church was dark, and it seemed to Herbert so vast and strange at this late hour. Candles gleamed on the altar, at the end of a long, shadowy aisle. Their footsteps made no sound on the velvet carpet as they walked under the dim arches to the front seat. His aunts and his uncles and his brother's big friends from the training camp seemed suddenly to appear out of the shadows and silently fill the front rows.

In the queer light he kept recognizing familiar faces that smiled and nodded at him in the dimness. Even Miss Shake and Nannie looked queer in the pew behind. Nannie was dressed in her "day-off" clothes. She was crying. Herbert looked about him wonderingly: yes, Miss Shake was crying, too--and that lady in the black veil over there: oh, how she was crying! No; he didn't like this party.

Through a little s.p.a.ce between his father's arm and a stone pillar he could see Leonard's back. Leonard was standing on the white stone steps, very straight. Then he kneeled down, and Herbert heard his sword click on the stone floor. The minister, dressed in a white and purple robe, with one arm out-stretched, was talking to him in a sing-song voice.

Herbert couldn't see Marjorie, the pillar was in the way; but he felt that she was there. Leonard's voice sounded frightened and m.u.f.fled, not a bit like himself, but he heard Marjorie's voice just as plain as anything--

"Till death us do part."

Presently the choir began to sing, and his mother found the place in the hymn-book. Herbert couldn't read, but he knew the hymn. Each verse ended,--

"Rejoice, rejoice, Rejoice, give thanks, and sing."

Herbert looked on the hymn-book and pretended he was reading. The book trembled. Leonard and Marjorie were pa.s.sing close to the pew. They looked, oh, so pleased! Leonard smiled at his mother, and she smiled back. She lifted Herbert up on the seat and he watched them pa.s.s down the dark aisle together and out through the shadowy doorway at the very end. The little boy felt a vague sensation of distress. He looked up at his mother and the distress grew. She was still singing, but her mouth kept getting queerer and queerer as she came to the line,--

"--give thanks, and sing."

He had never seen his mother cry before. He didn't suppose she could cry. She was grown up. You don't expect grown-up people, like your mother, to cry--except, of course, Nannie and Miss Shake.

"Rejoice, rejoice, Rejoice, give thanks, and sing."

He sang it for her. The voices of the choir seemed suddenly to have traveled a long way off and the tones of the organ were hushed. He heard his own voice echoing in the silent church. The words seemed to come out all wrong. He felt a terrible sense of oppression in the region of his stomach, and he wondered if he were going to be ill. It was a relief to hear himself crying at the top of his lungs, and to have Nannie scolding him lovingly, and leading him out of the church. He drove home, sniffing but comforted, in his father's lap.

"He felt it," old Nannie said to Burns, as she lifted him out of the carriage. "The child understood, bless him!"

"There wasn't a dry eye come out 'f the church," said Burns, "except them two selves."

"I wonder where they've gone?" said Nannie, eyeing Burns jealously.

"They must have took a train, I suppose?"

"That's telling," said the old man, whipping up the horses that were covered with foam.

III

Four days is a long, long time, Marjorie had said, for the hours that are breathlessly counted make long, long days; they are long as those of summer-childhood in pa.s.sing. But ever, when it comes May, and the soft, chill breezes blow from the ocean across the sun-soaked sands, and the clouds run dazzling races with the sea gulls, Marjorie will feel herself running too, catching up breathless a few paces behind Leonard, as on that second afternoon on a wind-swept beach of the Kentish coast. Like mad things, their heads thrown back, hair flying, mouths open, the spray smiting their open eyes, with all the ecstasy of their new-found energy, they clambered over the slippery seaweed and leaped from rock to rock, swept along with the winds, daring the waves, shouting down the surf.

Marjorie, when those spring days come round again, will remember a little cove, sheltered from the wind, warmed by the fitful spring sunlight, where, panting, they threw themselves down on the sand, bodies glowing, faces to the sun.

"h.e.l.lo, sun!" cried Marjorie.

"h.e.l.lo, clouds!" cried Leonard.

"h.e.l.lo, old sea gulls!" cried Marjorie, beginning to sneeze.

"G.o.d, but I feel fit; I feel glorious! Don't you, Marjie?"

"Don't I, though! I feel glorious. O G.o.d!" cried Marjorie, who did not know whether that was swearing or praying, and did not care.

Leonard ran his hands through the chill, warm sand, and watched a huge black spider promenading with bustling importance up his arm.

"The female spider eats the male as soon as he fertilizes the eggs, but he has to just the same," said Leonard, dreamily.

"Let's kill her," said Marjorie.

"No."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"She's a cannibal," said Marjorie.

"No, it's her instinct," said Leonard.

He opened an alleyway for the spider in the sand, and, with his head down close, watched it hustling away. "It's the same with us; we know we have every chance of being killed in this war, and we have to go, and we're glad to. It's not courage or sacrifice; it's instinct."

"You think so, Leonard?"

"It's not nice to lie alongside of a man you've killed and watch him die," said Leonard, inconsistently, eyes looking down into the sand, head pillowed on his arm.

"Did you have to, Len?"

"I didn't exactly mean to kill him. He was wounded," murmured Leonard, raising little white pools in the sand with his nostrils. "We had a rotten day and had taken a small position which didn't amount to anything when we got it. _Wasn't_ I in a nasty sulk! Some of my green men had funked just at the crucial moment, and I had all but shot one.

The ground was covered with wounded. Couldn't tell theirs from ours.

Awful mess. I was coming back across the field over dead bodies, and cursing every one I stumbled across. I suppose I felt pretty sick. I saw a helmet gleaming in some burnt shrubbery. It was a nice s.h.i.+ny one, with an eagle crest. It occurred to me you'd written me to send you one, 'because all the girls had them'--remember?"

Leonard rolled over close beside her and his head went down into the sand again.

"I went to pick it up, but it seems I got something else with it. A great blonde fellow in gray, all powdered with dust and bleeding,--Jove!

how he was bleeding!--came up with it. It surprised me and he managed to knife me, and over I went, on top of him. I had my pistol c.o.c.ked, and I let him have it right in the chest. I must have fainted, because when I came to I was on my back and the moon was s.h.i.+ning in my eyes. The man in gray was there alongside of me, supporting himself on one arm and looking at me.

"'I am dying,' he said in German.