“My father—a month ago—at Ypres,” she replied.
“I am going—over there,” eagerly explained Topham, “and I have no one. I feel that I—shall never return. I wonder if you—— Will you kiss me good-bye? I promise you I shall never kiss another woman—that I will be faithful—until the end,” he finished with wistful whimsicality.
Her smile was like a soft flame. Without a word she stepped close to him and, as he doffed his cap and bent, she clasped him about the neck, drew his close-cropped head down, and kissed him on the lips.
There was no time for words. Topham had to spring for the moving gang-plank. The bugle had sounded its last call for stragglers such as he. The girl who had given him his sweet farewell was swallowed up in the crowd.
Halfway across the Channel Topham found he could not even recall the girl’s features, the colour of her eyes or hair. All that remained to him was a dim expression of sweet, yearning womanliness, an abstract conception.
At the transfer hospital, a week later, Topham’s shattered, helpless form was laid for a few moments on a cot. His fall from a great height after a desperate duel with a German Taube left him victor and hero but with the shadow of death hovering over him. Numbness mercifully stilled the pain that had gripped him and he lay passive. It was not until he felt the touch of a hand softer than that of the hurrying surgeon who had given hasty “first aid” examination that he opened his eyes. A woman nurse, the only one he had seen so near the lines, was bending over him. He could see only dimly. A mist was over his eyes from the explosion of his engine. Her touch, however, seemed to give him a thrill of vitality. When she moved on he sank into semi-coma, with the feeling of chill. Death bearing down on him. She moved again to his side and he moaned. The grim grip was tightening. Like a boy he was afraid. In the world there was only himself, this woman, and approaching death.
“I am going,” he muttered swiftly, as the nurse bent near. “Will you kiss me good-bye? I can promise you—I will be faithful—until the end.” His smile was a pitiful effort at humour. He felt her warm lips on his—and then oblivion.
Topham came to himself—save for the memory of a delirium of travel in motor-ambulance and boat—in a clean white bed in a large, lofty room. When his senses cleared he knew he was in England. White-clad nurses moved about the room in which were many other beds containing huddled or stretched-out figures. At his first movement one of the nurses came to his bedside. Her keen glance, under her significant cap, spoke efficiency and warm human sympathy. A few deft touches, a spoon of medicine, a pat of the pillow, and she was gone.
Topham awoke again in the dark small hours when man’s vitality is at its lowest ebb; awoke with that familiar depression, as of a chill hand gripping his heart—squeezing his very soul. It was Death, again, groping for him. Only his brain seemed clear. He tinkled, with a supreme effort, the bell at his bedside. A nurse came, her face indistinct in the dim light, and bent over him in an attitude of solicitation.
“What is it?” she asked, and her voice seemed that of an angel from Heaven.