“You’ll see things now.”
“Little Bobs!” roared Sheba.
“God bless him!
Did you see where he’s going to take the field?”
John Dorsey Leonard laid down the paper, and bent over with high drooling laughter.
“Lord a’mercy!” he gasped.
“Let the rascals come now!”
Ah, well — they came.
All through that waning summer, Eugene shuttled frantically from the school to Dixieland, unable, in the delirium of promised glory, to curb his prancing limbs.
He devoured every scrap of news, and rushed to share it with the Leonards or Miss Crane.
He read every paper he could lay his hands on, exulting in the defeats that were forcing the Germans back at every point.
For, he gathered from this wilderness of print, things were going badly with the Huns.
At a thousand points they fled squealing before English steel at Mons, fell suppliantly before the French charge along the Marne; withdrew here, gave way there, ran away elsewhere.
Then, one morning, when they should have been at Cologne, they were lined up at the walls of Paris.
They had run in the wrong direction.
The world grew dark.
Desperately, he tried to understand.
He could not.
By the extraordinary strategy of always retreating, the German army had arrived before Paris.
It was something new in warfare.
It was several years, in fact, before Eugene could understand that some one in the German armies had done some fighting.
John Dorsey Leonard was untroubled.
“You wait!” he said confidently.
“You just wait, my sonny.
That old fellow Joffer knows what he’s about.
This is just what he’s been waiting for.
Now he’s got them where he wants them.”
Eugene wondered for what subtle reason a French general might want a German army in Paris.
Margaret lifted her troubled eyes from the paper.
“It looks mighty serious,” she said.
“I tell you!”
She was silent a moment, a torrent of passion rose up in her throat.
Then she added in a low trembling voice:
“If England goes, we all go.”
“God bless her!” Sheba yelled.
“God bless her, ‘Gene,” she continued, tapping him on the knee.
“When I stepped ashore on her dear old soil that time, I just couldn’t help myself.
I didn’t care what any one thought.
I knelt right down there in the dirt, and pretended to tie my shoe, but say, boy”— her bleared eyes glistened through her tears —“God bless her, I couldn’t help it.
Do you know what I did?
I leaned over and kissed her earth.”
Large gummy tears rolled down her red cheeks.
She was weeping loudly, but she went on. “I said: This is the earth of Shakespeare, and Milton, and John Keats and, by God, what’s more, it’s mine as well!
God bless her!
God bless her!”
Tears flowed quietly from Margaret Leonard’s eyes.
Her face was wet.
She could not speak.
They were all deeply moved.
“She won’t go,” said John Dorsey Leonard.