We watched them for five minutes. Then the whole scintillating fabric collapsed; and we sat down to wait for the frantic motor-boat, which was already thumping towards us, with the reporter of the Rockport Sentinel furiously writing in her bows.
VIII
MAY MARGARET
"Clerk Sanders and May Margaret
Walked ower yon garden green,
And sad and heavy was the love
That fell thae twa between."
May Margaret was an American girl, married to a lieutenant in the British Army named Brian Davidson. When the regretful telegram from the War Office, announcing his death in action, was delivered to her in her London apartment, she read it without a quiver, crumpled it up, threw it into the fire, and leaned her head against her arm, under his photograph on the mantel-piece. When her heart began to beat again, she went to her bedroom and locked the door. This was not the Anglo-American love-affair of fiction. Both of them were poverty-stricken in the estimation of their friends; and it was only by having her black evening dress "done over," and practising other strict economies for a whole year, that May Margaret had been able to sail from New York to work in an European hospital. The marriage had taken place a little more than three months ago, while Davidson was home on a few days' leave.
After the announcement of his death, she did not emerge from her room until the usual letter arrived from the front, explaining with the usual helplessness of the brother officer, that Davidson was really "one of the best," that "everybody liked him," and that "he was the life and soul of his company." But the letter contained one thing that she was not expecting, an official photograph of the grave, a quarter-plate picture of an oblong of loose earth, marked with a little cross made, apparently, of two sticks of kindling wood. And it was this that had brought her back to life again. It was so strangely matter-of-fact, so small, so complete, that it brought her out of the great dark spaces of her grief. It reminded her of something that Davidson had once written in a letter from the trenches. "Things out here are not nearly so bad as people at home imagine. At home, one pictures the war as a great blaze of horror. Out here, things become more sharply defined, as the lights of a city open up when you approach them, or as the Milky Way splits itself up into points of light under the telescope. I have never seen a dead body yet that looked more imposing than a suit of old clothes. The real man was somewhere else."
She examined the photograph with a kind of curiosity. In this new sense of the reality of death, the rattle of the traffic outside had grown strange and dreamlike, and the rattle of the tea-things and the smell of the buttered toast which an assiduous, but discreet landlady placed at her side, seemed as fantastic and remote as any fairy-tale. All the trivial details of the life around her had assumed a new and mysterious quality. She seemed to be moving in a phantasmagorical world. The round red face of the landlady came and went like the goblin things you may see over your shoulder in a looking-glass at twilight. And the center of all this insubstantial dream-stuff was that one vivid oblong of loose earth, marked with two sticks of kindling wood, in the neat and sharply defined official photograph.
There was something that looked like a black thread entwining the arms of the tiny cross; and she puzzled over it stupidly, wondering what it could be. "I suppose I could write and ask," she said to herself. Then an over-mastering desire seized her. She must go and see it. She must go and see the one fragment of the earth that remained to her, if only for the reason that there, perhaps, she might find the relief of tears. But she had another reason also, a reason that she would never formulate, even to herself, an over-mastering impulse from the depths of her being.
May Margaret had no intimate friends in London. She had established herself in these London lodgings with the cosmopolitan independence of the American girl, whose own country contains distances as great as that from London to Petrograd. The world shrinks a little when your own country is a continent; and it was with no sense of remoteness that she now went to the telephone and rang up the London office of the Chicago Bulletin.