The great pageantry of pain and pride and death hung through the dusk its awful vision, touching his sorrow with a lonely joy.
He had lost; but all pilgrimage across the world was loss: a moment of cleaving, a moment of taking away, the thousand phantom shapes that beaconed, and the high impassionate grief of stars.
It was dark.
Irene Mallard took him by the hand and led him out on the porch.
“Sit down here a moment, ‘Gene.
I want to talk to you.”
Her voice was serious, low-pitched.
He sat beside her in the swing, obediently, with the sense of an impending lecture.
“I’ve been watching you these last few days,” said Irene Mallard.
“I know what’s been going on.”
“What do you mean?” he said thickly, with thudding pulses.
“You know what I mean,” said Irene Mallard sternly.
“Now you’re too fine a boy, ‘Gene, to waste yourself on that Woman.
Any one can see what she is.
Mother and I have both talked about it.
A woman like that can ruin a young boy like you.
You’ve got to stop it.”
“How did you know about it?” he muttered.
He was frightened and ashamed.
She took his trembling hand and held it between her cool palms until he grew quieter.
But he drew no closer to her: he halted, afraid, before her loveliness.
As with Laura James, she seemed too high for his passion.
He was afraid of her flesh; he was not afraid of “Miss Brown’s.”
But now he was tired of the woman and didn’t know how he could pay her.
She had all his medals.
All through the waning summer he walked with Irene Mallard.
They walked at night through the cool streets filled with the rustle of tired leaves.
They went together to the hotel roof and danced; later
“Pap” Rheinhart, kind and awkward and shy, and smelling of his horse, came to their little table, sitting and drinking with them.
He had spent the years since Leonard’s at a military school, trying to straighten the wry twist of his neck.
But he remained the same as ever — quizzical, dry, and humorous.
Eugene looked at that good shy face, remembering the lost years, the lost faces.
And there was sorrow in his heart for what would come no more.
August ended.
September came, full of departing wings.
The world was full of departures.
It had heard the drums.
The young men were going to the war.
Ben had been rejected again in the draft.
Now he was preparing to drift off in search of employment in other towns.
Luke had given up his employment in a war-munitions factory at Dayton, Ohio, and had enlisted in the Navy.
He had come home on a short leave before his departure for the training-school at Newport, Rhode Island.
The street roared as he came down at his vulgar wide-legged stride, in flapping blues, his face all on the grin, thick curls of his unruly hair coiling below the band of his hat.
He was the cartoon of a gob.
“Luke!” shouted Mr. Fawcett, the land-auctioneer, pulling him in from the street to Wood’s pharmacy, “by God, son, you’ve done your bit.
I’m going to set you up.
What are you going to have?”
“Make it a dope,” said Luke.
“Colonel, yours truly!”
He lifted the frosty glass in a violently palsied hand, and stood posed before the grinning counter.