“Say you love me,” she would whisper.
“Why, of course, you sweet baby.”
“Am I a baby?” This almost wistfully.
“Just a little baby.”
She knew vaguely of Gloria. It gave her pain to think of it, so she imagined her to be haughty and proud and cold. She had decided that Gloria must be older than Anthony, and that there was no love between husband and wife. Sometimes she let herself dream that after the war Anthony would get a divorce and they would be married — but she never mentioned this to Anthony, she scarcely knew why. She shared his company’s idea that he was a sort of bank clerk — she thought that he was respectable and poor. She would say:
“If I had some money, darlin’, I’d give ev’y bit of it to you…. I’d like to have about fifty thousand dollars.”
“I suppose that’d be plenty,” agreed Anthony.
— In her letter that day Gloria had written: “I suppose if we could settle for a million it would be better to tell Mr. Haight to go ahead and settle. But it’d seem a pity….”
… “We could have an automobile,” exclaimed Dot, in a final burst of triumph.
AN IMPRESSIVE OCCASION
Captain Dunning prided himself on being a great reader of character. Half an hour after meeting a man he was accustomed to place him in one of a number of astonishing categories — fine man, good man, smart fellow, theorizer, poet, and “worthless.” One day early in February he caused Anthony to be summoned to his presence in the orderly tent.
“Patch,” he said sententiously, “I’ve had my eye on you for several weeks.”
Anthony stood erect and motionless.
“And I think you’ve got the makings of a good soldier.”
He waited for the warm glow, which this would naturally arouse, to cool — and then continued:
“This is no child’s play,” he said, narrowing his brows.
Anthony agreed with a melancholy “No, sir.”
“It’s a man’s game — and we need leaders.” Then the climax, swift, sure, and electric: “Patch, I’m going to make you a corporal.”
At this point Anthony should have staggered slightly backward, overwhelmed. He was to be one of the quarter million selected for that consummate trust. He was going to be able to shout the technical phrase, “Follow me!” to seven other frightened men.
“You seem to be a man of some education,” said Captain Dunning.
“Yes, Sir.”
“That’s good, that’s good. Education’s a great thing, but don’t let it go to your head. Keep on the way you’re doing and you’ll be a good soldier.”
With these parting words lingering in his ears, Corporal Patch saluted, executed a right about face, and left the tent.
Though the conversation amused Anthony, it did generate the idea that life would be more amusing as a sergeant or, should he find a less exacting medical examiner, as an officer. He was little interested in the work, which seemed to belie the army’s boasted gallantry. At the inspections one did not dress up to look well, one dressed up to keep from looking badly.
But as winter wore away — the short, snowless winter marked by damp nights and cool, rainy days — he marvelled at how quickly the system had grasped him. He was a soldier — all who were not soldiers were civilians. The world was divided primarily into those two classifications.
It occurred to him that all strongly accentuated classes, such as the military, divided men into two kinds: their own kind — and those without. To the clergyman there were clergy and laity, to the Catholic there were Catholics and non-Catholics, to the negro there were blacks and whites, to the prisoner there were the imprisoned and the free, and to the sick man there were the sick and the well…. So, without thinking of it once in his lifetime, he had been a civilian, a layman, a non-Catholic, a Gentile, white, free, and well….
As the American troops were poured into the French and British trenches he began to find the names of many Harvard men among the casualties recorded in the Army and Navy Journal. But for all the sweat and blood the situation appeared unchanged, and he saw no prospect of the war’s ending in the perceptible future. In the old chronicles the right wing of one army always defeated the left wing of the other, the left wing being, meanwhile, vanquished by the enemy’s right. After that the mercenaries fled. It had been so simple, in those days, almost as if prearranged….
Gloria wrote that she was reading a great deal. What a mess they had made of their affairs, she said. She had so little to do now that she spent her time imagining how differently things might have turned out. Her whole environment appeared insecure — and a few years back she had seemed to hold all the strings in her own little hand….
In June her letters grew hurried and less frequent. She suddenly ceased to write about coming South.
DEFEAT
March in the country around was rare with jasmine and jonquils and patches of violets in the warming grass. Afterward he remembered especially one afternoon of such a fresh and magic glamour that as he stood in the rifle-pit marking targets he recited “Atalanta in Calydon” to an uncomprehending Pole, his voice mingling with the rip, sing, and splatter of the bullets overhead.
“When the hounds of spring …”
Spang!
“Are on winter’s traces …”
Whirr-r-r-r! …
“The mother of months …”
“Hey! Come to! Mark three-e-e! …”
In town the streets were in a sleepy dream again, and together Anthony and Dot idled in their own tracks of the previous autumn until he began to feel a drowsy attachment for this South — a South, it seemed, more of Algiers than of Italy, with faded aspirations pointing back over innumerable generations to some warm, primitive Nirvana, without hope or care. Here there was an inflection of cordiality, of comprehension, in every voice. “Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us,” they seemed to say in their plaintive pleasant cadence, in the rising inflection terminating on an unresolved minor.
He liked his barber shop where he was “Hi, corporal!” to a pale, emaciated young man, who shaved him and pushed a cool vibrating machine endlessly over his insatiable head. He liked “Johnston’s Gardens” where they danced, where a tragic negro made yearning, aching music on a saxophone until the garish hall became an enchanted jungle of barbaric rhythms and smoky laughter, where to forget the uneventful passage of time upon Dorothy’s soft sighs and tender whisperings was the consummation of all aspiration, of all content.
There was an undertone of sadness in her character, a conscious evasion of all except the pleasurable minutiae of life. Her violet eyes would remain for hours apparently insensate as, thoughtless and reckless, she basked like a cat in the sun. He wondered what the tired, spiritless mother thought of them, and whether in her moments of uttermost cynicism she ever guessed at their relationship.
On Sunday afternoons they walked along the countryside, resting at intervals on the dry moss in the outskirts of a wood. Here the birds had gathered and the clusters of violets and white dogwood; here the hoar trees shone crystalline and cool, oblivious to the intoxicating