Well, he could not remain here any longer. The air was biting, and the sun was going down. Across the road the little drug-store even then was twinkling out with lights behind its blue and green glass urns. Two boys and a girl were drinking something at the soda-fountain through straws, and laughing a great deal. It somehow turned him sick, he could not tell why. He had done things like that many a time himself.
There was a little stone church down the street, with a spire and bells. The sun touched the bells with burnished crimson till they looked like Christmas cards. A youthful rural football team went noisily across the road, discoursing about how they would come out that night if their mothers would let them; and the station cab came down the street full of passengers, and waited for a lady at the meat-market. He could see the legs of a chicken sticking out of the basket as the driver helped her in.
He began to wonder why he hadn’t stayed in the city and spent his forty-six cents for something to eat. It would have bought a great many crackers, say, or even bananas. He passed the bakery, and a whiff of fresh-baked bread greeted his nostrils. He cast a wistful eye at the window. Of course he might go in and ask for a job in payment for his supper. There were his soldier’s clothes. But no. That was equivalent to begging. He could not quite do that. Here in town they would have all the help they wanted. Perhaps, farther out in the country—perhaps—he didn’t know what; only he couldn’t bring himself to ask for food, even with the offer to work. He didn’t care enough for that. What was hunger, anyway? A thing to be satisfied and come again. What would happen if he didn’t satisfy it? Die, of course, but what did it matter? What was there to live for, anyway?
He passed a house all windows, where children were gathered about a piano with one clumsily playing an accompaniment. There was an open fire, and the long windows came down to the piazza floor. They were singing at the top of their lungs, the old, time-worn song made familiar to them by community sing-songs, still good to them because they all knew it so well,
“There’s a long, long trail a-winding
Until my dreams all come true;”
and it gripped his heart like a knife. He had sung that song with her when it was new and tender, just before he sailed away; and the trail had seemed so long! And now he had reached the end of it, and she had not been there to meet him! It was incredible! She so fair! And false! After all those months of waiting! That was the hardest part of it, that she could have done it, and then explained so lightly that he had been away so long she was sure he would understand, and they both must have got over their childish attachment; and so on, through the long, nauseating sentences of her repeal. He shuddered as he said them over to his tired heart, and then shuddered again with the keen air; for his uniform was thin, and he had no overcoat.
What was that she had said about the money? He needn’t worry about it. A sort of bone to toss to the lone dog after he was kicked out. Ah, well! It was paid. He was glad of that. He was even grimly glad for his own destitution. It gave a kind of sense of satisfaction to have gone hungry and homeless to pay it all in one grand lump, and to have paid it at once, and through his lawyer, without any word to her or her father either. They should not be even distant witnesses of his humiliation. He would never cross their path again if he had his way. They should be as completely wiped out of his existence and he out of theirs as if the same universe did not hold them.
He passed down the broad, pleasant street in the crisp air, and every home on either hand gave him a thrust of memory that stabbed him to the heart. It was such a home as one of these that he had hoped to have some day, although it would have been in the city, perhaps, for she always liked the city. He had hoped in the depths of his heart to persuade her to the country, though. Now he saw as in a revelation how futile such hopes had been. She would never have come to love sweet, quiet ways such as he loved. She couldn’t ever have really loved him, or she would have waited, would not have changed.
Over and over again he turned the bitter story, trying to get it settled in his heart so that the sharp edges would not hurt so, trying to accustom himself to the thought that she whom he had cherished through the blackness of the years that were past was not what he had thought her. He stopped in the road beside a tall hedge that hid the Hazard house from view, and snatched out her picture that he had carried in his breast pocket till now; snatched it out, gazed upon it with a look that was not good to see on a young face, and tore it across! He took a step forward, and every step he tore a tiny fragment from the picture and flung it into the road bit by bit till the lovely face was mutilated in the dust where the feet of passers-by would grind upon it and where those great blue eyes that had gazed back at him from the picture so long would be destroyed forever. It was the last thread that bound him to her, that picture; and, when the last scrap of picture had fluttered away from him, he put his head down and strode forward like one who has cast away from him his last hope.