Part 11

And Margaret? He had to become acquainted with her all over again, too. She seemed younger than before he had left her to go to France. It was not alone her dress. He noticed that the women were wearing short skirts in imitation of the Parisiennes. It was not alone in her manner of combing her hair. It lay in a childish freshness that was at once impudent and sophisticated. Margaret had never been a serious-minded young lady, but now she seemed fairly to flutter above the realities of life.

They were returning from a dance one evening, at which Robert had incurred Margaret’s displeasure by attempting to sit out most of his dances. It was almost two o’clock and they were driving down a deserted street. Before the war, midnight had generally been the limit for a dance, unless it was some exceptional occasion, like the annual charity ball, for instance.

“You know, you seem--you seem so much younger than when I left,” said Robert.

“Oh, do I?”

“Yes.”

“And I suppose you don’t like it. You’d want me to stay home every evening and darn socks and go to bed at nine, I suppose. What’s the matter with you, Bob? We used to be such good pals. Don’t, don’t--oh, I don’t know.”

They drove on in silence. How could he explain things to her? How could he make her understand his feelings? He wished, in a way, that he had postponed their engagement, not that they wouldn’t marry eventually anyway, but that it placed him under obligations. He had to escort her to dances and receptions and take her to the theatre. Of course, he got a certain amount of pleasure out of these things, but then he preferred simply to loaf about the house. It was queer, a fellow lay in the mud in Flanders for months under a drizzling sky and dreamed of coming home. Home was pre-eminently a place for loafing. A place where one could sleep as late as one wanted, lounge about in old clothes and sleep some more. Now that one finally did reach home, one found that practise did not square with theory. Theoretically, Hamilton could have stayed in bed all morning. But when his parents were at the breakfast table at eight o’clock, he felt under a moral obligation to do likewise, especially now that the burden of housework had fallen on the shoulders of a single servant. Theoretically, too, he could have retired at eight every evening or stayed up until three in the morning, but practically, there were always social duties to perform. Margaret was always calling him up and claiming him.

There was no use trying to explain a thing like that to Margaret. How could she understand? She would probably think that he was getting old. He was only twenty-six. Had the war aged him? He had always taken Pinkney for a prematurely aged young man, and yet, while Pinkney was able to talk business and finances with the elders of the city, he was able to cut a commanding figure in the younger social set. He knew all the latest steps and even introduced little variations that he had picked up in New Orleans, Charleston and Baltimore.

With Dorothy, he reflected, he could sit idly at a table or walk along the street and express his thoughts--he had need to express them to some one. He wished, too, that Margaret did not so openly disapprove of what he had said in defense of the Negro that evening at his home. For a woman, anyway, he would have preferred that Margaret take the more humane point of view. He was old-fashioned enough to believe that a woman should display the softer virtues.

“What are you thinking about?” Margaret pouted coquettishly. “You haven’t said a word to me for five minutes, excepting monosyllables.”

“Oh, a lot of things. I--”

“Well, you mustn’t. That’s a bad habit. You should live instead of thinking about it. See ‘how sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank.’”

Margaret’s mood could change from the colloquial to the mock poetic in a moment. When she quoted poetry it was with a little exaggerated air, as though she were pretending to act.

“‘Eat thou and drink,’” she quoted grandiloquently, “‘tomorrow thou shalt die.’ That’s what Howard recites to me sometimes. Don’t you think that’s right?”

“Yes, perhaps it is, but it’s only one point of view. Rossetti, you know, wrote three sonnets, each giving a different viewpoint, and that is only one of them.”

“Oh, is that so? Anyway, I think it’s very beautiful. Don’t you?”

Margaret relapsed into her poetic mood. She would ask Robert if he had heard this or that and then recite it with her coquettishly exaggerated emotion. It was very delightful on the whole. If she wished to sit closer to him, too, or hold his hand she could do it in play, as though it were part of the gestures accompanying the recitation. Some of the poems she quoted, Robert thought splendid, but others were sentimental bits that she had picked up from the fillers in the evening newspaper. She would quote, almost in the same breath with Shakespeare, the rhymed imbecilities of a syndicate humorist whose chief contribution to poesy was his method of arranging the lines so that they were separated by little asterisks and so that one had to read from the bottom line to the top. Probably otherwise nobody would ever read the stuff. The announced object of arranging the lines from bottom to top was to get the reader in the habit of always looking upward and onward to higher things, the highest thing being the rhymster’s signature, Milt Elkron, on the very pinnacle.

There were quarter hours, too, when Margaret would discuss “books,” that is, fiction. Here, too, she would speak of O. Henry, Henry James and James Branch Cabell with indiscriminate enthusiasm, although the first of the three was the only one of whom she had really read more than one volume.

“I didn’t like Wells’ last book. It was very disappointing. Not much plot. Too heavy. But Harold Bell Wright has a corking story. It’s just like life!”

Robert liked Margaret’s make-believe mood, during which she pretended to be giving expression to some inner spirit through the medium of verse. Pretense, after all, was something. And she pretended without in the least attempting to deceive. It was just a game. Of course, she expected him to return her little sallies with others in kind or with graceful, flowery compliments, which he could do skilfully. For instance, if she, coming to a dark spot in the road, and letting go of his arm, suddenly cried: “Thou know’st the wash of night is on my face, else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek,” he would reply: “Lady, by yonder blessed moon, I swear”--or something about Stygian darkness, and they would both laugh.

“Why don’t you ever write poetry?” asked Margaret, as they stopped before her house. “I think you ought to write something splendid. I have a trade-last for you.”

“Oh, have you? What is it? I’m all ears.”

“But you must tell me one first,” she pouted.

That struck him as another one of her childish absurdities.

“Oh, I--a--know some one who thinks you’re the prettiest girl in Corinth.”

“Do you? Who’s that?”

“Guess?”

“Can’t.”

“Try.”

“It isn’t, it isn’t you? Oh, that isn’t fair? You just made that up!”

“Oh, but it is though. Of course, I think you’re the prettiest girl in Corinth.”

He caught her in his arms and kissed her to prove it.

“Has to be some one else! Has to be some one else!” Margaret insisted, with fascinating mock childishness.

“Well, then,” Robert thought a moment, “it’s Howard Pinkney. Now are you satisfied?”

She shook her head, with a little smile.

“No. That’s just as bad. He tells me that himself every time I see him. But I’ll tell you anyway.”

The compliment was a minor one. Some elderly, romantic woman, whom Robert dimly remembered, had thought he looked like a poet--like a picture she had of Rupert Brooke--a far-fetched likeness.

“And now,” Margaret was standing at the door, her head thrown back, her eyes shining like dark stars:

“‘_Sweet, goodnight! This bud of love, by summer’s ripening breath, May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet. Goodnight, goodnight! as sweet repose and rest Come to thy heart as that within my breast!_’”

Her make-believe mood again. She was playing at being in love. She blew him a tantalizing kiss before the illusion had time to die, and disappeared into the house. Robert stood there for a moment. He realised that Margaret was only playing, that she had probably learned the words--yes, he even remembered where she had learned them--while taking the rôle of Juliet in her senior class play. Still the objective world was a series of illusions. What matter what Margaret was thinking or feeling within that pretty little head if she could always create such illusions. If she could always create them. He walked slowly back to his car. A cloud momentarily obscured the moon. The shadowy world of silver turned to black and then back to silver. If she could always do that.

In his room he found his official orders where he had stacked them on the chifferobe two days ago. He had forgotten to sort them. He yawned and began undressing leisurely. His hand brushed against the documents and he paused to stack them up again. Here was a copy of the telegram appointing him a second lieutenant in the Officers Reserve Corps, the order directing him to appear at Camp Eustis, the order assigning him to his company. And what was that scribbled across one of the envelopes? A poem.

“_The agéd pilgrim hastens on the road Nor stops to pluck the flowers by the way Lest Death o’ertake him ere the close of day._”

It sounded familiar. He read on to the end:

“_And here and there a scarlet memory._”

He suddenly remembered. Dorothy. McCall. McCall had scribbled the poem on an old envelope. Robert remembered lending it to him--in the hospital. But--yes, he had been right all the time. By a sort of instinct. He undressed, turned off the lights and raised the shades. The moonlight lay like a river of silver across the shadowy lawn. A world of illusion and of beauty. Tomorrow, he said, he would ask Margaret to set the day. They should be married as quickly as possible.

XXI

The next morning Robert awoke only after he had been called three times. The sun was shining brightly into his window and he realized that it was past the family breakfast hour. He lay in bed thinking of what he would do, found that he was still in bed and stretched leisurely. As long as he was late for breakfast he might as well be still later. He suddenly remembered his resolve to see Margaret and induce her to set their wedding as soon as possible.

Of course, he could not with propriety visit her this morning, after having seen her only a few hours before. He would wait until afternoon. In the meantime he must straighten those papers.

As his eyes fell upon the old envelope again he had an impulse to tear it, another to send it to McCall, and a third, which he followed, to keep it with his other records. He would keep it with certain other letters, as a woman might keep old rose petals--not to bloom again, but to remind one of the past.

He noticed a card, which he had at first mistaken for the postal ordering him to report at Plattsburg. Now he saw it was a white card with the words “Non Silba Sed Anthra” in large letters on the top line. “Non Silba Sed Anthra?” Where had that come from? Let’s see. That was Latin. Anyway, he knew what two of the words meant. He went to the bookcase and pulled out his Latin dictionary. There it was.

Now he remembered. That fat man had given it to him. Oh, yes, Jarvis. He picked up the card and read it:

“Sir, six thousand men who are preparing for eventualities have their eyes upon you. You are being weighed in the balance!

“The Call is coming! Are you able and qualified to respond?

“Discuss this matter with no one.

“Oohay-Oohay-Oopay.”

It seemed rather ridiculous, some sort of a practical joke, until he remembered the society with an equally ridiculous name--Trick Track Tribe--of which Jarvis and the Pinkneys had spoken. The society that was to protect the white race, womanhood, the United States Constitution and several other things. That reminded Robert that he had promised Howard Pinkney to see him.

Before his plate Robert found two letters. The one with the Chicago postmark he opened first and read over his oatmeal. Mrs. Hamilton came in and sat opposite, although she had long since eaten her breakfast.

“Oh, mother,” he exclaimed, “a letter from Bill McCall!”

“One of your college friends?”

“No. He’s the man I’ve been telling you about. Don’t you know? That Chicago newspaper man!”

“Oh, yes, it’s too bad that he doesn’t live in Corinth.”

“I’ve never really told you or dad all that he’s done for me.”

He laid the letter to one side and looked grave.

“He’s going to have an operation--a serious operation--on his eye. It’s going to take place tomorrow morning and he writes about it as though it were a joke!”

“Well, dear, maybe it’s not so serious as you think. Surgeons can do such marvelous things nowadays. Don’t you think you’d better finish your breakfast? Did he get it in the war?”

Robert nodded.

“Yes. I never told you the details. I was afraid it might--upset you, but Bill was wounded while trying to save me.”

Briefly he sketched the account of his rescue, minimizing as much as possible the danger to himself. His mother covered her face with her hands.

“If I had known it at the time I couldn’t have stood it, Robert.”

She took a seat beside him, placed her arm about his shoulders and rested her head against him. Mammy Chloe’s dark face appeared for a moment in the swinging door leading to the kitchen, a steaming plate of corn fritters in her hand, but she did not enter. Robert took his mother’s hand and was conscious of innumerable little details of color and form.

“Just think,” he said, “not to be able to see anything!” Not to be able to see, he thought, the sun gleaming through a window and falling in bands of gold across the blue rug, with tiny dust motes dancing in them. Not to see snowy linen or shining silverware or glittering glass. Not to see the warm glow of polished rosewood and the cheerful glow of ivory woodwork. Not to see one’s mother or one’s own face in the mirror. He shut his eyes for a moment.

“And to think that I can’t do anything,” he said at length. “That I can’t even talk to him. And he writes about ‘going over the top once more.’”

His mother tried to comfort him.

“I’m sure he’ll come through it all right,” she said. “It’s too late to send him a letter, but you could send him a telegram.”

“Yes.” Hamilton rose. “I must do that.” He took up the second envelope mechanically and opened it. It was a card like the one Jarvis had given him, with the same heading: “Non Silba Sed Anthra” across the top. The Latin annoyed him, the childish air of mystery, evidently designed to impress persons who did not own Latin dictionaries. There was the same silly signature, Oohay-Oohay-Oopay--pig Latin, of course, for H. H. P., Howard Pinkney. Who else would be asinine enough to think of it? Another message, designed to be mysterious, followed the heading:

“Sir:

“You have been weighed in the balance and found not wanting!

“Strong Men--Brave Men (evidently Pinkney himself)--R-E-A-L Men (probably little Jarvis). We need such men. We know you are one.

“The Bogeys of the Fourth Dimension will shortly issue their call. Be discreet, preserve silence and bide the coming.

“Discuss this matter with no one.

“Oohay-Oohay-Oopay.”

Robert was thinking of McCall. The follow-up invitation of the Trick Track Tribe jarred on him. He thrust the card in his pocket and walked out to send his telegram.

As he walked toward his street car he offered little prayers to a God whom he now realized he had invoked all too seldom of late. He wondered why he should have been saved and McCall chosen to undergo this ordeal. And how would Dorothy take it? Would she be at his bedside?

In Paris the operation had been accepted fatalistically and in a spirit of bravado by both of them. That was because it lay still so far in the future and, too, perhaps, because they then still retained the war-time psychology, the callous outlook upon life and death that frequent contact with these had formed.

The car jolted and was dirty. The blacks, he noticed, were squeezed together in a section dirtier than the one in which he sat. It was growing warm. In another few weeks summer would be there.

Pinkney was just leaving the telegraph office.

“Oh, yes, I was going to see you today,” said Robert with a guilty feeling.

“So you got our summons from the Fourth Dimension?” inquired Pinkney with an earnest smile. “We need brave men, real men, Hamilton, to carry on our work.” There was an allusion to the flaming rood that Robert did not understand and he was able to get away only long enough to send a short message to McCall. Pinkney took his arm and insisted on escorting him to his office. On the way they paused to exchange a few words with acquaintances, some of whom referred mysteriously to the coming concilium.

Pinkney’s office was a truly magnificent one, just off the main office of the Corinth Lumber Company, with a commanding sweep of the city’s principal thoroughfare. One’s feet sank into a soft, thick rug of mauve and one’s eye immediately took in the glass-covered mahogany desk and the decorations on the wall--a silk American flag under glass, his captain’s commission in the home guards, a college diploma, a membership in some civic organization and a poem “To My Mother”--all framed. Not until they had come quite into the room did they notice that they were not alone. A rather tall, wavy-haired man with shrewd blue eyes and a straight-line mouth was standing at the window, chewing a cigar. He wore a light checked suit and tan oxfords, and had the appearance of looking older than he really was. As he saw Pinkney he waved his right hand in an indefinite salute without, at the same time, straightening up.

“Captain Hamilton,” said Pinkney, “this is Mr. Griffith.”

They shook hands, Robert mumbled an acknowledgment and Mr. Griffith said he was very glad to meet him.

“Mr. Griffith--later you’ll know him by a rather more pretentious title, Robert--is what I might term the brains of the Tribe,” remarked Pinkney. “Won’t you gentlemen take a seat? Now we can talk more comfortably. Cigars? Oh, try a _good_ brand.”

Griffith smiled so that all his teeth, including a gold tooth in front and several gold-filled ones, shone.

“That’s just some o’ his bull. Don’t you pay any attention to him,” he laughed.

“No, that’s the whole truth. You know, Captain, while you were fighting for civilization on Flanders Fields, Griffith was one of the men who was fighting the good fight over here through the most potent weapon that man has ever devised.” Griffith grinned as though Pinkney were quoting a phrase with which he was familiar, or, perhaps, had even coined himself. “That weapon is nothing else than publicity!”

Hamilton nodded. Since his return he had learned that cotton, that wood, that conservation of coal and food, that the county councils of defense, that the women, that the Y. M. C. A., that a hundred different things had won the war, and he was not surprised to hear now that publicity was the most potent weapon of mankind.

“Griffith here is an old newspaper man.”

“Oh, I know a newspaper man,” said Hamilton, to make talk. “One of my best friends in the army was correspondent for the Chicago Times.”

“What’s his name?”

“McCall.”

“Sure. I’ve read his stuff. So he was over with your outfit. Gee, he could have cleaned up if he’d been home.”

Pinkney resumed charge of the conversation and employed it in briefly sketching the more recent portion of Griffith’s biography. He had been connected with some newspaper when the war broke out, what connection, was evidently unimportant, Pinkney casting all newspaper men in one huge category as he might walnut logs or hardwood. At the outbreak of the World War he had foreseen the tremendous importance of publicity and had offered his services to various organizations in raising funds, recruiting members, and so forth. He had been secretary of the first drive ever held in Corinth to raise money for the Belgian war sufferers. Later when the Red Cross, the Y. M. C. A., the Y. W. C. A., the Salvation Army, the Near East, the Chinese, the French and several local and state organizations had started their drives Griffith’s services had been in demand.

“Corinth went over the top on every drive through this man,” said Pinkney proudly.

The expression “over the top” grated on Hamilton. It was the same phrase McCall had used in describing his coming operation.

“Weren’t you the first man to use ‘over the top’ to describe exceeding a quota?” asked Pinkney.

“Some say I was,” smiled Griffith. “But I’ve got to be going, folks. I’m mapping out a campaign to cover the entire United States.” He leaned over the desk, and drew diagrams on it with his finger as he spoke. There were hard, practical lines about his mouth, and his eyes narrowed almost to slits. “See, we’ll cover every section. We’ll have a perfect military organization with a commander-in-chief at the head.”

He went on, sketching rapidly with his forefinger on the mahogany his idea of a feudalistic system that would make the Tribe all powerful in the United States. There were strategic positions to be carried at all costs--certain localities in each state which offered an easy entrance. There were districts, corresponding to congressional districts, that must be covered by an army of Bogeys. Here was a citadel hard to break through. Here a breach in the walls. He waxed more and more enthusiastic over his plan. His words came more and more forcibly. His forefinger flashed faster and faster. His eyes gleamed. He leaned over the desk and pounded on it with his fist.

A transformed figure, Hamilton thought, from the man who had slouched against the wall when he had first entered--an almost fanatical leader, carried away with an idea. The plan was made up of bits of military science, of salesmanship, perhaps picked up through some correspondence course, of the technique of carrying on drives. Out of his miscellaneous reading, evidently, and out of an idea upon which he had been brooding perhaps for years, this man had evolved his huge “campaign.” Hamilton guessed that he was a few years above the draft age and reflected ironically what might have happened if Griffith, with his almost insane imagination, had been placed in charge of a body of troops in France.