On that first evening he had been little more than
a pleasantly unhappy face, a voice, the means with
which to pass an hour, but when she kept her engagement
with him on Saturday she regarded him with consideration.
She liked him. Unknowingly she saw her own tragedies
mirrored in his face.
Again they went to the movies, again they wandered
along the shadowy, scented streets, hand in hand this
time, speaking a little in hushed voices. They
passed through the gate—up toward the little
porch—
“I can stay a while, can’t I?”
“Sh!” she whispered, “we’ve
got to be very quiet. Mother sits up reading
Snappy Stories.” In confirmation he heard
the faint crackling inside as a page was turned.
The open-shutter slits emitted horizontal rods of
light that fell in thin parallels across Dorothy’s
skirt. The street was silent save for a group
on the steps of a house across the way, who, from
time to time, raised their voices in a soft, bantering
song.
“—When you wa-ake You shall ha-ave
All the pretty little hawsiz—”
Then, as though it had been waiting on a near-by roof
for their arrival, the moon came slanting suddenly
through the vines and turned the girl’s face
to the color of white roses.
Anthony had a start of memory, so vivid that before
his closed eyes there formed a picture, distinct as
a flashback on a screen—a spring night
of thaw set out of time in a half-forgotten winter
five years before—another face, radiant,
flower-like, upturned to lights as transforming as
the stars—
Ah, la belle dame sans merci who lived in his
heart, made known to him in transitory fading splendor
by dark eyes in the Ritz-Carlton, by a shadowy glance
from a passing carriage in the Bois de Boulogne!
But those nights were only part of a song, a remembered
glory—here again were the faint winds,
the illusions, the eternal present with its promise
of romance.
“Oh,” she whispered, “do you love
me? Do you love me?”
The spell was broken—the drifted fragments
of the stars became only light, the singing down the
street diminished to a monotone, to the whimper of
locusts in the grass. With almost a sigh he kissed
her fervent mouth, while her arms crept up about his
shoulders.
As the weeks dried up and blew away, the range of
Anthony’s travels extended until he grew to
comprehend the camp and its environment. For
the first time in his life he was in constant personal
contact with the waiters to whom he had given tips,
the chauffeurs who had touched their hats to him,
the carpenters, plumbers, barbers, and farmers who
had previously been remarkable only in the subservience
of their professional genuflections. During his
first two months in camp he did not hold ten minutes’
consecutive conversation with a single man.
On the service record his occupation stood as “student”;
on the original questionnaire he had prematurely written
“author”; but when men in his company
asked his business he commonly gave it as bank clerk—had
he told the truth, that he did no work, they would
have been suspicious of him as a member of the leisure
class.
