by Howard Fast
The sun was sinking. Already it had turned the green sides of Steer’s Head to darkness, and in a little while it would swing away to one side and set. As always with the twilight, a breeze had come up, playing over the fields, grass and leaves dancing with it, blossoms falling in a facetious imitation of snow.
And the grass that swept off to the house was burnished. Nothing is quite as lovely as a sweep of burnished grass, the green assuming all sorts of impossible colors, a blending that would shock the heart of the most renegade artist; the trees were burnished, too; the roof of the house quivered with light.
“It is very beautiful,” he mused. “Always it is beautiful, but to-night, somehow, it is more beautiful than ever.”
“Yes,” she agreed quietly.
In a decidedly matter-of-fact way, he said: “I suppose you know and have known that I love you.”
“I knew—for two years now,” she answered—in the same matter-of-fact way.
“Then I suppose it will do just as well not to say all those silly things I had planned.”
“Perhaps you could try,” she smiled, not looking at him.
Abruptly changing the tone of his voice, he said: “I went to Charleston today.”
“I had wondered where you disappeared to.”
“I enlisted in the army. It is curious that I should have chosen to-day, for the detachment leaves for camp to-morrow.”
She did not speak. She turned, and was looking full into his eyes, her lips attempting to form themselves into a smile that would tell him she knew it for a rather forlorn and bitter jest. What little blood there was in her face drained away; and the white leaped from her dark hair. Reaching forth a hand, she caught it in his blouse.
“That is not so,” she declared firmly.
“But it is, Inez. To-morrow I am leaving. That is why I told you to-night that I love you. I love you, Inez, but I would not have said that—ever, perhaps. Now I can. Don’t you see, Inez, that this changes everything?”
“What was there to change?” she pleaded.
“Inez, this was the only way to reach for the stars, and I took it.” (Could he tell her of the garden? How could she understand that?) “I enlisted, and now I can say that I love you. Do you love me, Inez?”
“You didn’t know?”
“Inez—Inez—Inez, what are you saying?”
“I love you, John Preswick. Will you tell me now that I am a fool, and that you are not going away?”
In silence he stared before him to the slope, to the house, to the garden. The sun was a little lower, and the burnished surface of the grass was losing its sheen; but further east the sky had taken on a gamut of color, and it was burning like a mirror opposite a fire.
“I am going. But I did not think it would be this way; I thought you would—”
“You thought I would be happy. You thought I would cheer you on and tell you to die. I would—but I love you, John Preswick.”
“You do not—cannot—understand.”
“But I do understand! Why have you done it? Why must, you go off and be killed? You are only a boy. You will be killed, while they wave their flags. I know. But there are others. They do not need you.”
“Inez,” he said softly, “I will not be killed. I will come back, and then, perhaps, you will understand why I went. When I come back, Inez, I shall not go again. Then, for the rest of my life, I will be here—and I will be happy. But now I could not be happy, Inez. If you will only try to understand. It is many things, but most of all, it is the spell that hangs in the garden. Don’t laugh at me, Inez. It is something real, and that I am afraid of. So I am going to the war, Inez, and who knows what shall happen? But I will not die. I will come back, and then—
“Inez,” he said suddenly, “will you marry me?”
(But how could he ask this madness of her?)
“Inez, I am nobody, but I love you. That is what I had planned to say, Inez, and after all, I am saying it. It is the usual thing to say, but, God, how true it is! Tell me, Inez.”
She said: “Why, yes. Of course I will marry you.”
“Then you’ll wait, Inez?”
“Have I not always waited?” she whispered. “Yes, I’ll wait, Johnny.” But she had not called him that ever before; always it had been, half mockingly, John Preswick.
“Inez, I’ll come back. I swear to you that I will come back, Inez. But I must go, Inez, because it is calling. I cannot always look at the sea. If you were a man, Inez, and you looked at the sea, you would know what I mean. Now, Inez, tell me that you are not sorry.”
“I am not, Johnny.”
“Inez, look at me, and we will take a pledge that while the other lives, we will wait. Is that childish, Inez? But here, take my hand.”
She took his hand; and then, with the quickness of thought, she was in his arms, a small, frightened bit of hair and flesh, and he was kissing her, and stroking her trembling hands, and feeling the soft giving of her breast against his.
7
THEN they did not speak. His back was to the bole of the tree, and, her small body clutched in his arms, she lay against his breast, her hair to his face. There was a perfume to her hair that he drank in, breathing it deep, and sometimes running his hand over the dark surface to stir it to life. Her hair formed a rimmed crown about her face, and, beneath it, he could just see the edge of her features, thinner, more wan than ever. But they lit with a flush that had crept up from her lips, dispelled the violet, and painted her skin with life-color. It was the color of red wine when it runs upon white.
And now the sun had passed to one side of the Steer’s Head, dipping and touching the hedge itself, so that all along the green surface a fire danced, a transient fire that faded and disappeared even as they watched it. Through the hedge the sun shone, like fire through a gnome-made lattice, briefly—and then it was gone, and twilight had come, and to the east lingered the soft illusion of a reflected sun. Thin strips of cloud flung themselves east and west, as though a careless painter had daubed with water color long, graceful strokes.
John Preswick said: “So often the sun sets! And then it is dark. We never question that the sun will come again, do we, Inez?”
“No,” she answered him quietly, “we never question it, John Preswick.”
The night-breeze came, soft, half warm, half cool, drifting reluctantly and apologetically. She shivered a little, and he held her closer.
When they stood up, they turned and, hand in hand, they walked towards the house, snubbing their toes in the thick grass. And from beneath them, the night-breeze took the scent of the garden, flinging it into their lips and nostrils, until they gasped to take the choking from their breath. They came to the house, and they walked in, passing through the garden and pausing beneath the high, slim portico before they opened the door. The room directly before them was dark, but as they stood there, their eyes became accustomed to the darkness, and they made out the form of Mrs. Vetchen sunk in a chair in one corner. On tiptoe they would have gone past, but Inez caught his hand when they were in the middle of the chamber.
“She is asleep. Listen to her breathing.”
Inez held his hand tighter, and they remained there, tense in the darkness, looking at the tiny, barely distinguishable figure. Then they went through to the dining room, where their dinner had been waiting hours.
Because it was the last night, they went out after the dinner, and they sat upon one of the concrete-cast benches in the garden. Now the flowers were full in their spring bloom, dim masses in the shadows, but dripping with scent, tea, rambler and red roses, peppermint pinks, tulips, peas all over in haphazard confusion. They were in a well of it, the odor creeping to their heads, while they sat close, bare arms touching. When it was very late, they went in, she to her room after he had held her in his arms and kissed her.
He went back to the sitting room, but Mrs. Vetchen was no longer there. Dropping into the chair she had used, he stared over to the other wall, where the two portraits lay, a
lthough now in the darkness they were quite invisible. But he did not need light to see them. Very clearly they hung in his mind: the boy with the soft, womanish lips, so ready to tremble and break into a smile, and the man, his son, broken, and so weary with life that it burned through the brush of a painter who, probably, did his best to earn his fee with a creditable and pleasing piece of portraiture. And the man’s sleeve was empty, as his eyes were empty—or perhaps his eyes were but away. John Preswick wondered. He wondered too what had come to the boy that he should beget something so grim and repulsive. Yet it might have been that the boy’s lips had changed, that the smile had trembled into being and then gone.
Long into the night John Preswick sat there, even after the negro butler had bolted the doors and extinguished all the lights. When at last he rose to leave, he let himself out quietly, went around the house and through the wide-set trees to the gardener’s shack. Old Frank was asleep, his broad animal-snores rocking out as the door opened, and then, as it shut, confining themselves to the space within.
John Preswick took off his clothes and crawled into bed.
8
THE next morning he left; and from Charleston the train took him to a training camp, a city in itself, with row upon row of frame houses that echoed hollowly to the sound of thousands of voices. That was Camp Wadsworth, where for months he was drilled, driven, and spurred into as splendid a young animal as the government could make him; then, when he was deemed in a fit condition to be killed, he and thousands of others boarded trains and after that boats, and came at last to France. But before that, she saw him—many times. In a large, top-heavy, open car, they would drive up, Inez and the little old woman, bringing always baskets of fruit and cake and candies, and great armfuls of flowers cut from the garden. The flowers he never took, but, as they lay in the car, he would look at them with Inez, and then look into her eyes, as to say he understood all too well. In that time while he was at camp the change came about in their attitude towards him, a change he could never entirely comprehend. The old woman said little, but in her eyes was the expression he had seen when she turned from the picture to him. And Inez?—Inez loved him.
As often as they might, they came; and often, when they left, Mrs. Vetchen’s eyes would gleam, and she would hold his hand with her thin, blue-veined one. And once, towards the end, he kissed her again.
So it was that the time in camp was more a space between their visits than their visits intervals in camp. Almost daily she wrote to him curious, tender letters, but such letters as a child would write, penned in a large, sprawling script, many words spelt wrong, sentences that were deliciously laughable, punctuation forgotten, and continual reiteration of those phrases he loved, and which he remembered and recomposed, so that they seemed almost to fall from her lips. But all in all, they were letters that a child would write, and, perhaps, for that very reason he loved them more than ever.
For when he looked back he realized that’ he had never known another woman or girl who was so much of a child, so small, frail, and outrageously trustful. Sometimes—sometimes when he looked at her, he thought that in her eyes he saw something: a gleam, or an answer to his; and in the times when she had dragged him to the top of Steer’s Head, he thought that she saw things he longed for her to see; but, again, he knew that he was mistaken, and in the knowledge there was something of a wistful regret.
Now that he was away, everything bulked more clearly, and he understood how in the time he had spent at the Steer’s Head, the world had paused, and how now again it was slowly revolving upon its axis. But he never, quite knew whether he was sorry—whether it would have been better to have stood beneath the oak, she by his side, and looked at the narrow blue strip that told where the sea was—only looked at it. There was a strange ghost, though he told himself Lucille Croyden was dead.
The very last time he saw her, he did not kiss her; but he held her hand, stared down at the palm of it, then turned it over and studied the thin violet threads that marked the path of her blood.
“Good-by, Inez,” he said; and he remembered, long afterward, how close she had stood, and how her face was turned up, lips parted a bit, and how much her eyes desired for him to kiss her. When he recalled her face, it was always that expression and that position, and her eyes were always as then, blue with a deep green shadow, and her cheeks ran with the violet color, sunken, in a manner that would make another appear haggard. Her face started from her hair with terrible suddenness.
That he remembered all the way across, and when he came to France he remembered it still. He saw it in every letter he opened, and at nights, forgetting the sullen rumble, he saw it again.
France was very beautiful where their training camp was, and now he felt to himself that he would have had it this way for a longer time. Thinking of killing, something vital and necessary went out of him, leaving him limp and wet about the brow. Not that he was afraid, for he reasoned to himself that, knowing he would return, there was surely nothing to fear. And he knew he would return. That he never questioned; it was as sure as the skies, as sure as the night that always came. Now and again it occurred to him, with abruptness, that in a way entirely different from any of the others, he looked upon the war—hardly did he know that it was a war; hardly did he know what to expect, nor did he care. The war was not in the tale—not in the tale. And after all, he would think wistfully, it was a tale…. And the long talks upon patriotism and making the world safe for democracy—he heard them, and that was all. But he made a good soldier, for he was intelligent, as such things go, and his body was large and well knit.
Perhaps he knew, in the way that such things are known, that for him the war would be over almost instantly, when he had stood upon a firing-step for exactly twelve minutes. They went up in the night, advancing the last distance beneath a heavy, clouded sky for what seemed miles along a walk of boards, laid upon beams over mud, sunk so deep in some places that they waded through muck half way to their knees. Ahead of them, so near that they could see the light of star shells, the front thundered intermittently. In a single file they walked, crouched, silent, with nothing but the dim forms bulking up ahead to guide them. Occasionally there would be a hissing whine, like the sound of a thousand whips being whirled through the air, and then they would crouch lower, hesitating in their stride, until the concussion came. Once it burst in the line of them ahead; after that they passed by wounded men, invisible, but groaning in the darkness.
It was the most tangible darkness John Preswick had ever experienced; and he thought that if he were to draw his bayonet, he could hew the night into slabs, and cast them aside. About the night, he thought, and about the garden, and about the strip of water that could be seen from the top of the Steer’s Head; he hardly heard the cries of dying men. He was aware of several other things: of the jointed movements required to fix bayonets, of the position of his gas mask and how he would adjust it, if the need came, of the swift motion that would fling a new clip into his rifle; he was aware of these because they had become part of him, instinctive as walking and desiring food. The helmet upon his head was heavy.
Into a trench, crumbling and only waist high, they came, and moved along it, crouching low. It joined another and deeper trench at right angles, and, turning, they took their way down it. The night was black as a sea of ink, but their sleeves brushed forms which they could just make out, silent forms pressed to the side of the trench, forms that hissed with breath, but were otherwise dead.
It seemed to John Preswick that for hours he had been making his way through that trench, while it turned and twisted until all his sense of direction was lost, while the growling of the front grew ever nearer and louder. At times, when they had to squeeze past, he felt the accouterments of other men, heard the clank of arms, or felt his elbow dart into flesh. Always there was the hoarse breathing, the muck under their feet, and the foul stench which he had come to know exudes from a decaying carcass.
Whenever a shell burst, they would
break their stride, crouch, and sigh afterwards. Once a globule of mud had been flung into his face, partly in his half-open mouth. Walking, he wiped it away with the back of his palm, spitting again and again to remove the harsh particles. Once he tread full upon a yielding body, the, thought coming to him that all those before him had tread upon that same body, and that all those after him would do likewise, until form and expression were stamped out of it, until every bone was crushed.
Now the trench was broader and higher, there being a firing-step upon which silent sentinels crouched, each turning to gaze at the snake-like, stooping, advancing line. He wondered whether they were French, or British, or American. So dark it was that he could not tell, and they spoke not at all.
Once more they turned before the signal to halt was given; then, almost as they stopped, the world before them broke into a thundering to make the noise of before sound like the chattering of children. As they paused, another line was passing in the opposite direction, a file of ghosts. Officers thrust their way through, calling orders, striving to make themselves heard above the din.
Until the world appeared ready to burst apart, the roaring increased, concussions coming so fast upon one another that their sound blended. And the whine of shells rose in crescendo. A whistle sounded. Incredible confusion between the two passing lines. The order was given to mount the firing-step and fix bayonets. More confusion from the line passing in the other direction. Hoarse curses.
His head was just above the parapet. Before him the darkness was broken by jagged edges of flame, interspersed with smaller pinpoints; shells were bursting in quick regularity; and the noise rocked against his ears until he was forced to open his mouth to ease the pressure. Forward upon the bags lay his rifle.