“I’ll never try to amuse the kids again,”
said the baited Verschoyle. “Children and
newspapers are low things.... And I was hit on
the nose by a wad, too! They oughtn’t to
be allowed blank ammunition!”
So we leaned against the railings in the warm twilight
haze while the battalion, silently as a shadow, formed
up behind us ready to be taken over. The heat,
the hum of the great city, as it might have been the
hum of a camped army, the creaking of the belts, and
the well-known faces bent above them, brought back
to me the memory of another evening, years ago, when
Verschoyle and I waited for news of guns missing in
no sham fight.
“A regular Sanna’s Post, isn’t it?”
I said at last. “D’you remember, Vee—
by the market-square—that night when the
wagons went out?”
Then it came upon me, with no horror, but a certain
mild wonder, that we had waited, Vee and I, that night
for the body of Boy Bayley; and that Vee himself had
died of typhoid in the spring of 1902. The rustling
of the papers continued, but Bayley, shifting slightly,
revealed to me the three-day old wound on his left
side that had soaked the ground about him. I saw
Pigeon fling up a helpless arm as to guard himself
against a spatter of shrapnel, and Luttrell with a
foolish tight-lipped smile lurched over all in one
jointless piece. Only old Vee’s honest face
held steady for awhile against the darkness that had
swallowed up the battalion behind us. Then his
jaw dropped and the face stiffened, so that a fly made
bold to explore the puffed and scornful nostril.
* * * *
*
I waked brushing a fly from my nose, and saw the Club
waiter set out the evening papers on the table.
“THEY”
Neither the harps nor the crowns amused,
nor the cherubs’ dove-winged
races—
Holding hands forlornly the Children wandered
beneath the Dome;
Plucking the radiant robes of the passers
by, and with pitiful faces
Begging what Princes and Powers refused:—“Ah,
please will you let us
go home?”
Over the jewelled floor, nigh weeping,
ran to them Mary the Mother,
Kneeled and caressed and made promise
with kisses, and drew them along
to the gateway—
Yea, the all-iron unbribable Door which
Peter must guard and none other.
Straightway She took the Keys from his
keeping, and opened and freed
them straightway.
Then to Her Son, Who had seen and smiled,
She said: “On the night that
I bore Thee
What didst Thou care for a love beyond
mine or a heaven that was not my
arm?
Didst Thou push from the nipple O Child,
to hear the angels adore Thee?
When we two lay in the breath of the kine?”
And He said:—“Thou hast
done no harm.”
