Almost every night Anthony came to town. It was
too cool now for the porch, so her mother surrendered
to them the tiny sitting room, with its dozens of
cheaply framed chromos, its yard upon yard of decorative
fringe, and its thick atmosphere of several decades
in the proximity of the kitchen. They would build
a fire—then, happily, inexhaustibly, she
would go about the business of love. Each evening
at ten she would walk with him to the door, her black
hair in disarray, her face pale without cosmetics,
paler still under the whiteness of the moon. As
a rule it would be bright and silver outside; now
and then there was a slow warm rain, too indolent,
almost, to reach the ground.
“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.
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.
