"Momser!" he cried. "Chammer! Lump! Ganef! You hear that? Two thousand! Two thousand! Didn't I tell you—didn't I tell you to practise?"
Even as Leon Kantor put pen to this princely document, Franz Ferdinand of Serbia, the assassin's bullet cold, lay dead in state, and let slip were the dogs of war.
* * * * *
In the next years, men, forty deep, were to die in piles; hayricks of fields to become human hayricks of battle-fields; Belgium disemboweled, her very entrails dragging, to find all the civilized world her champion, and between the poppies of Flanders, crosses, thousand upon thousand of them, to mark the places where the youth of her allies fell, avenging outrage. Seas, even when calmest, were to become terrible, and men's heart-beats, a bit sluggish with the fatty degeneration of a sluggard peace, to quicken and then to throb with the rat-a-tat-tat, the rat-a-tat-tat of the most peremptory, the most reverberating call to arms in the history of the world.
In June, 1917, Leon Kantor, answering that rat-a-tat-tat, enlisted.
In November, honed by the interim of training to even a new leanness, and sailing-orders heavy and light in his heart, Lieutenant Kantor, on two days' home-leave, took leave of home, which can be crudest when it is tenderest.
Standing there in the expensive, the formal, the enormous French parlor of his up-town apartment de luxe, from not one of whose chairs would his mother's feet touch floor, a wall of living flesh, mortared in blood, was throbbing and hedging him in.
He would pace up and down the long room, heavy with the faces of those who mourn, with a laugh too ready, too facetious, in his fear for them.
"Well, well, what is this, anyway, a wake? Where's the coffin? Who's dead?"
His sister-in-law shot out her plump, watch-encrusted wrist. "Don't,
Leon!" she cried. "Such talk is a sin! It might come true."