“There are Americans over there, droves of them.”
“Yes, but they're not wearing our uniform. We ought to be over there under our own flag. I ought to be over there.”
“Maybe you will be. I'll go on ahead and be waiting for you.”
There is nothing more pitiful than sorrow that tries to smile, and Jim groaned:
“Oh, Charity Coe! Charity Coe!”
He gripped the wheel to keep from putting his hand out to hers. And they went in silence, thinking in the epic elegy of their time.
Jim drove his car up to the end of Rhode Island and across to Tiverton; then he left the highway for the lonelier roads. The car charged the dark hills and galloped the levels, a black stallion with silent hoofs and dreadful haste. There was so much death, so much death in the world! The youth and strength and genius of all Europe were going over the brink eternally in a Niagara of blood.
And the sea that Charity was about to venture on, the sea whose estuaries lapped this sidelong shore so innocently with such tender luster under the gentle moon, was drawing down every day and every night ships and ships and ships with their treasures of labor and their brave crews till it seemed that the floor of the ocean must be populous with the dead.
Charity felt quite close to death. A very solemn tenderness of farewell endeared the beautiful world and all its doomed creatures. But most dear of all was this big, simple man at her side, the man she ought to have married. It was all her fault that she had not. She owed him a profound eternal apology, and she had not the right to pay the debt—that is, so long as she lived she had not the right. But if they were never to meet again—then she was already dying to him.
It was important that she should not depart this life without making restitution of what she owed. She had owed Jim Dyckman the love he had pleaded for from her and would not get from anyone else.