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Page 36
And Mary squealed laughter. She put hands each side of his face.
"Jim--listen. I'll try to explain because you have a right to
understand."
"Well, yes," agreed Jim.
"It's like this. I thought you'd enlist and I never dreamed you were
balky. I didn't know you hated it so. Why didn't you tell me?"
"Go on," urged Jim.
"I thought you were mad to be going, like--like these light-headed boys.
That you didn't mind leaving me compared to the adventure. That you
didn't care for danger. But now--now." She covered his eyes with her
fingers, "Now Jim, you need me. A woman can't love a man her best unless
she can help him. Against everything--sorrow, mosquitoes, bad
food--drink--any old bother. That's the alluring side of tipplers. Women
want to help them. So, now I know you need me," the soft, unsteady voice
wandered on, and Jim, anchored between, the hands, drank in her look
with his eyes and her tones with his ears and prayed that the situation
might last a week. "You need me so, to tell you how much finer you are
than if you'd gone off without a quiver."
Barlow sighed in contentment. "And me thinking I was the solitary
'fraid-cat of America!"
"Solitary! Why, Jim, there must be at least ten hundred thousand men
going through this same battle. All the ones old enough to think,
probably. Why Jim--you're only one of them. In that speech the other
night the man said this war was giving men their souls. I think it's
your kind he meant, the kind that realizes the bad things over there and
the good things over here and goes just the same. The kind--you are."
"I'm a hero from Hero-ville," murmured Barlow. "But little Mary, when I
come back mangled will you feel the same? Will you marry me then, Mary?"
"I'll marry you any minute," stated Mary, "and when you come back I'll
love you one extra for every mangle."
"Any minute," repeated Barlow dramatically. "Tomorrow?"
And summed up again the heaven that he could not understand and did not
want to, "Search me," he adjured the skies in good Americanese, "if
girls aren't the blamedest."
THE V.C.
I had forgotten that I ordered frogs' legs. When mine were placed before
me I laughed. I always laugh at the sight of frogs' legs because of the
person and the day of which they remind me. Nobody noticed that I
laughed or asked the reason why, though it was an audible chuckle, and
though I sat at the head of my own dinner-party at the Cosmic Club.
The man for whom the dinner was given, Colonel Robert Thornton, my
cousin, a Canadian, who got his leg shot off at Vimy Ridge, was making
oration about the German Crown Prince's tactics at Verdun, and that was
the reason that ten men were not paying attention to me and that I was
not paying attention to Bobby. When the good chap talks human talk,
tells what happened to people and what their psychological processes
seemed to be, he is entertaining. He has a genuine gift of sympathy and
a power to lead others in the path he treads; in short, he tells a good
story. But like most people who do one thing particularly well he is
always priding himself on the way he does something else. He likes to
look at Colonel Thornton as a student of the war, and he has the time of
his life when he can get people to listen to what he knows Joffre and
Foch and Haig and Hindenberg ought to have done. So at this moment he
was enjoying his evening, for the men I had asked to meet him, all
strangers to him, ignorant of his real powers, were hanging on his
words, partly because no one can help liking him whatever he talks
about, and partly because, with that pathetic empty trouser-leg and the
crutch hooked over his chair, he was an undoubted hero. So I heard the
sentences ambling, and reflected that Hilaire Belloc with maps and a
quiet evening would do my tactical education more good than Bobby
Thornton's discursions. And about then I chuckled unnoticed, over the
silly frogs' legs.
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