It was the dark hint again.
“What are you driving at, Lovey? What is there at home?”
His reply might have been paraphrased from a writing he had never heard of.
“There’s things ahead of you, Slim, different from what you’re expectin’ of. Wait.”
I confess to being startled. You must see me as in an overwrought condition, reacting from the tremendous strain, first of fighting, then of blindness, and thirdly of emotional stress. I do not pretend that more than any other man who comes back from the jaws of the infernal brazier in Flanders I was my normal self. I was easily up and easily down, easily excited and easily impressed. The mere cast of Lovey’s two brief sentences impressed me.
“What things?” I asked, with that mixture of credulity and rejection with which one puts questions to a trance medium.
“I’ll not tell ye; I’ll show ye; only ye must come ’ome.” As if in illustration of his words, he added, “Ye must begin to wait right now.”
“But why wait?”
“Because God A’mighty can’t give us everything to oncet. Didn’t I say He told me that Hisself? We ain’t fit to receive more’n a little at a time, just like babies. That’s another tip as Beady give me. And Mr. Christian he p’inted out to me oncet that wait is one of the frequentest words in the Bible. See here! Beady writ this for me.” Fumbling in an inside pocket, he drew forth a carefully folded bit of paper, saying, as he did so: “It was one of the times when I was awful low in my mind because you was away. I don’t ’old with them low fellas at the Down and Out—not as a reg’lar thing, I don’t—but now and then when I just couldn’t seem to get along without you I’d go down to one of the meetin’s. Then oncet Beady sits beside me and begins a-kiddin’ o’ me, callin’ me old son and everything like that. But by ’n’ by he sees I wasn’t in no such humor, and we starts in to talk serious-like. And then—well, I don’t ’ardly know ’ow I come to let it out—but Beady he sees just ’ow it was with me, and he bucks me up and writes me this. He ain’t as bad as you’d think he’d be, that Beady. It’s good words out of the Bible, and there’s a reg’lar tip in ’em.”