They rose and wound their way among the little green tables to the dancing platform. Charley raised her eyes to his as they danced. "Will you marry me to-morrow, Jesse? Before you go?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"That's all right for truck drivers and for sloppy emotionalists. But it's a poor plan. You're only suggesting it because of the music and my nearness and the fact that I'm leaving day after to-morrow. I'm no different than I was three months ago. I hate war as much as I ever did. If you think three months of camp training——"
"Will you marry me to-morrow, Jesse?"
"No."
"I'm afraid, Jesse."
"So am I. But not as scared as that." His cheek rested against hers. Her fingers clutched tight a fold of the bunchy cloth of his rough uniform. She could not bring herself to name the fear she felt. All the way home she pressed close to the rough sleeve—the good tangible rough cloth of the sleeve—and the muscle-hard arm within it.
Hyde Park is cut through by the Illinois Central tracks. All that summer and autumn and winter Charley would start up in her sleep at the sound of high shrill voices like the voices of children. Lottie Payson heard them, too, at night in the old house on Prairie and could not sleep again. The Illinois Central and Michigan Central trains were bringing boys to the training camps, or from the training camps to the points of embarkation. They were boys from Illinois farms, Wisconsin towns, Minnesota and Michigan villages. "Yee-ow!" they yelled as their trains passed through the great sleeping city. "Whoo-ee! Yip!" Keeping their courage up. Yelling defiance at a world gone mad. All that summer you heard them, and through the autumn and winter, and the next spring and summer and autumn. High young voices they were, almost like the voices of children. "Berlin or Bust" was scrawled in chalk on the outside of their cars—scrawled by some raw youth from Two Rivers, Wisconsin, who was going to camp and to war in a baseball cap and his Sunday pants and a red sweater.
Charley would pull the covers over her head and cover her ears with her hands until the last yip had died away. But Lottie would sit up in bed, her head thrown back, listening—listening as if they were calling to her.