Читать книгу The Lonely Warrior - Claude C. Washburn - Страница 7

“Two little black-birds sitting on a hill,

One named Jack and one named Jill.

Fly away, Jack!—Fly away, Jill!

. . . . . .

Come back, Jack!—Come back, Jill!”

Stacey performed the magic trick over and over again, while Carter searched unavailingly for the birds’ hiding-place, sure that he would find it the next time, and Jack, not understanding but delighted none the less, trotted around tirelessly after his brother, and the November twilight crept in through the windows and darkened the room. Then it was time for the children to go to bed, and Catherine led them away, leaving the two men together.

After a while she came back, and they all three went in to dinner.

Stacey glanced at the table appreciatively. “Phil has one human foible, anyway,” he said to Catherine. “He never cared what he ate, but he’s always been fastidious about how he eats it.”

Catherine gave him a rare smile, that softened her face to beauty. “Do you mean,” she asked, “that all the setting is good, but the dinner itself not?”

He laughed, pleased and surprised at the disappearance of her shyness. “You know I don’t. How can I tell what the dinner’s like when everything’s concealed beneath those heavy silver covers?”

He stayed until very late in the evening. It had always been Catherine’s way to disappear rather early and leave her husband and Stacey to themselves, no doubt because she knew that she had no real part in their intimacy. But to-night, though she went out of the room from time to time, she invariably returned. Indeed, she seemed different to Stacey. It was, he thought, as though one thickness of the veil between them had been stripped away. (Oh, Stacey! Dislike of impressionism?). Once he caught her gazing at him with a melancholy intentness; but, seeing that he was looking, she turned her eyes away at once and stared into the fire.

The war was not mentioned; but, because there was no feverishness in the talk or sense of constraint upon the three, Stacey felt that this revealed no attempt to evade the war and his share in it. The war was there and he was going to it. This was a simple fact, conceded by all three. There was nothing to do about it or say about it. War was not a part of their past or woven anyhow into the fabric of their minds. Not a bit of use for conversation.

“I’ll be down at the boat to-morrow morning,” Phil said, when at last Stacey rose to go.

“Thanks, Phil,” Stacey replied gratefully. “Good night, Catherine, and thank you both—ever so much. I feel—bathed in quiet happiness.”

Catherine gave him her hand, with a murmured good night, then dropped it abruptly.

“Shy once again,” thought Stacey with kindly amusement.

When the next day all good-byes had been said, and the great ship was sweeping out to sea, and Stacey was walking to and fro alone on the deck, with all his thirty years of life vanishing behind him, rounded out, ended, a completed story, while between it and his present self a mist began to rise, like the mist that was rising between ship and shore, he gathered up the impressions the final week had left him—gently, as one ties together old letters before putting them away. And, stripping them down to essentials, he could find but this:—that there was a sweet serenity in the memory of the afternoon and evening with the Blairs, an odd sense of comfort in the picture of Mrs. Latimer stepping towards him beneath the arc-light in front of her house, and—yes—comfort again in the thought of Julie—his sister, Julie, with whom he had never had anything in common save their relationship, but the vision of whose good-humored face, stained with tears, and of whose ridiculous efforts to make her eight-months-old baby say good-bye to Uncle Stacey, recurred to him now gratefully. In the thought of Marian there was only uneasy pain. Perhaps, he reflected sadly, this was just because she had hurt his vanity, or perhaps it was because at such a moment of leave-taking what one demanded was merely simple affection, or perhaps it was because intense love must be uneasy and painful.

Well....

He put the letters away and closed the drawer upon them.