... The American whom we know never speaks directly of the one he loves; it does not seem to occur to him that we have sympathy that enfolds his secrets. He asks questions—asks questions. He shakes his head. His college-trained intellect does not reach up, does not hold up its cup to receive the synthesis. It moves wearily from one to another of its separate analyses, with only rarely a connective flash of intuition. But his heart keeps burning, yearning all the time, and as he learns, he acts. So he seems very safe.... I have wished so often that he were going to you, instead of to his work in Europe, but that, of course, is selfish. He has his work there. We must hold him between us. He knows already that he will not be able to see and feel in France, as he does here. It is his ordeal. I have told him many times; every day, in fact, that what he sees and feels here, he must remember there, and hold to, until it is made working knowledge within him.... Our work is merely preparing. The Little Man, as Richard calls him affectionately from that old story, realizes that the hour is not yet. We work in the midst of many shades of darkness and obliquity and inhibition. We are marking time, marking time.... Our American will return to India in time to see the Day break. I have promised to keep him informed. As Paul Richard says, “We must prepare in ourselves that magnificent day.”

Miss Claes sat in silence. Then she seemed to become aware that voices above vaguely distracted. She went to the door, and listened. Fanny Gallup was crying, with little care who heard.

XXXII
FRANCE, 1918. THE YANK

DICKY hadn’t had his clothes off for several days. He was in the “Oregon” Forest with Colonel Boulding who was no sort of man to tie to for one who felt that a clean washrag was one of the necessities of life. Dicky hadn’t cared for strenuous field work but it had come to him in France; not the actions of the big fields so much as the extraordinary little back-line dramas that break the laws of perspective by rising more clearly, as days drew on. Four days before, on his way in to Paris, he had met Boulding, who was taking out several fresh battalions to relieve a hard-pressed front at St. Aignan.

“I’ve got an extra horse,” said Boulding, “good old Yorick, steady as a tram-car, and we’ll be back in three days.”

Dicky stood in the twilight, half rain, half snow—one of the interminable waits for order, Boulding back in the ranks somewhere. The firing had died down and Dicky dropped his bridle rein to bang his arms about to get some blood stirring in them. One of the problems of life just now was why wet snow soaked through leather quicker than straight rain water; another was why letters from home always dragged around the wrong fronts before being delivered; another was how long was IT going to last; another was hot coffee.

His mount had turned gently away in the thickening dusk, turned on his toe corks through the slush to follow a wind-blown leaf. Plop—a water-soaked trench-siding gave way, and Yorick disappeared into an unused pit. Dicky stared down into the inky dark. The beast snorted. A flashlamp was procured from one of Boulding’s lieutenants and Dicky found his way down into the trench.

It became clear why Yorick couldn’t rise, even if unhurt. The trench bottom was a six-inch paste of water and clay. Holding the flashlight in front of him, Dicky approached the sprawled beast. Yorick looked like a monster in the process of being born out of the mud. There was something both humorous and hopeless about the gaunt lifted head that came up into the ray. And now Dicky discovered that Yorick’s left foreleg below the knee veered off suddenly to the left, at a decided angle from the way it should lie. Dicky felt alone in a harrowing under world. The leaf that had caused it all, or possibly one like it, protruded from the snaffle ring. Yorick had come up to his leaf all right, and then forgotten what he had gone after.

“Pretty lucky old boy, you are,” Dicky said. “Work done, war over for you, nice warm ditch to lie up in at the last, and I’ve got to take all the responsibility.”

He drew the pistol from his belt and placed it on the little twist of hair halfway between the eyes.