“Sit down and wait,” suggested the lieutenant nonchalantly. “Girl seemed awful anxious to speak to you.”
Anthony’s hopes fell away.
“Thank you very much, sir.” And as the phone squeaked on the side-wall he knew who was calling.
“This is Dot,” came an unsteady voice, “I’ve got to see you.”
“Dot, I told you I couldn’t get down for several days.”
“I’ve got to see you to-night. It’s important.”
“It’s too late,” he said coldly; “it’s ten o’clock, and I have to be in camp at eleven.”
“All right.” There was so much wretchedness compressed into the two words that Anthony felt a measure of compunction.
“What’s the matter?”
“I want to tell you good-by.
“Oh, don’t be a little idiot!” he exclaimed. But his spirits rose. What luck if she should leave town this very night! What a burden from his soul. But he said: “You can’t possibly leave before to-morrow.”
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the night-service officer regarding him quizzically. Then, startlingly, came Dot’s next words:
“I don’t mean ‘leave’ that way.”
Anthony’s hand clutched the receiver fiercely. He felt his nerves turning cold as if the heat was leaving his body.
“What?”
Then quickly in a wild broken voice he heard:
“Good-by—oh, good-by!”
Cul-lup! She had hung up the receiver. With a sound that was half a gasp, half a cry, Anthony hurried from the headquarters building. Outside, under the stars that dripped like silver tassels through the trees of the little grove, he stood motionless, hesitating. Had she meant to kill herself?—oh, the little fool! He was filled with bitter hate toward her. In this dénouement he found it impossible to realize that he had ever begun such an entanglement, such a mess, a sordid mélange of worry and pain.
He found himself walking slowly away, repeating over and over that it was futile to worry. He had best go back to his tent and sleep. He needed sleep. God! Would he ever sleep again? His mind was in a vast clamor and confusion; as he reached the road he turned around in a panic and began running, not toward his company but away from it. Men were returning now—he could find a taxicab. After a minute two yellow eyes appeared around a bend. Desperately he ran toward them.
“Jitney! Jitney!” … It was an empty Ford…. “I want to go to town.”
“Cost you a dollar.”
“All right. If you’ll just hurry—”
After an interminable time he ran up the steps of a dark ramshackle little house, and through the door, almost knocking over an immense negress who was walking, candle in hand, along the hall.
“Where’s my wife?” he cried wildly.
“She gone to bed.”
Up the stairs three at a time, down the creaking passage. The room was dark and silent, and with trembling fingers he struck a match. Two wide eyes looked up at him from a wretched ball of clothes on the bed.
“Ah, I knew you’d come,” she murmured brokenly.
Anthony grew cold with anger.
“So it was just a plan to get me down here, get me in trouble!” he said. “God damn it, you’ve shouted ‘wolf’ once too often!”
She regarded him pitifully.
“I had to see you. I couldn’t have lived. Oh, I had to see you—”
He sat down on the side of the bed and slowly shook his head.
“You’re no good,” he said decisively, talking unconsciously as Gloria might have talked to him. “This sort of thing isn’t fair to me, you know.”
“Come closer.” Whatever he might say Dot was happy now. He cared for her. She had brought him to her side.
“Oh, God,” said Anthony hopelessly. As weariness rolled along its inevitable wave his anger subsided, receded, vanished. He collapsed suddenly, fell sobbing beside her on the bed.
“Oh, my darling,” she begged him, “don’t cry! Oh, don’t cry!”
She took his head upon her breast and soothed him, mingled her happy tears with the bitterness of his. Her hand played gently with his dark hair.
“I’m such a little fool,” she murmured brokenly, “but I love you, and when you’re cold to me it seems as if it isn’t worth while to go on livin’.”
After all, this was peace—the quiet room with the mingled scent of women’s powder and perfume, Dot’s hand soft as a warm wind upon his hair, the rise and fall of her bosom as she took breath—for a moment it was as though it were Gloria there, as though he were at rest in some sweeter and safer home than he had ever known.
An hour passed. A clock began to chime in the hall. He jumped to his feet and looked at the phosphorescent hands of his wrist watch. It was twelve o’clock.
He had trouble in finding a taxi that would take him out at that hour. As he urged the driver faster along the road he speculated on the best method of entering camp. He had been late several times recently, and he knew that were he caught again his name would probably be stricken from the list of officer candidates. He wondered if he had not better dismiss the taxi and take a chance on passing the sentry in the dark. Still, officers often rode past the sentries after midnight….
“Halt!” The monosyllable came from the yellow glare that the headlights dropped upon the changing road. The taxi-driver threw out his clutch and a sentry walked up, carrying his rifle at the port. With him, by an ill chance, was the officer of the guard.
“Out late, sergeant.”
“Yes, sir. Got delayed.”
“Too bad. Have to take your name.”
As the officer waited, note-book and pencil in hand, something not fully intended crowded to Anthony’s lips, something born of panic, of muddle, of despair.
“Sergeant R.A. Foley,” he answered breathlessly.
“And the outfit?”
“Company Q, Eighty-third Infantry.”
“All right. You’ll have to walk from here, sergeant.”
Anthony saluted, quickly paid his taxi-driver, and set off for a run toward the regiment he had named. When he was out of sight he changed his course, and with his heart beating wildly, hurried to his company, feeling that he had made a fatal error of judgment.
Two days later the officer who had been in command of the guard recognized him in a barber shop down-town. In charge of a military policeman he was taken back to the camp, where he was reduced to the ranks without trial, and confined for a month to the limits of his company street.
With this blow a spell of utter depression overtook him, and within a week he was again caught down-town, wandering around in a drunken daze, with a pint of bootleg whiskey in his hip pocket. It was because of a sort of craziness in his behavior at the trial that his sentence to the guard-house was for only three weeks.
NIGHTMARE
Early in his confinement the conviction took root in him that he was going mad. It was as though there were a quantity of dark yet vivid personalities in his mind, some of them familiar, some of them strange and terrible, held in check by a little monitor, who sat aloft somewhere and looked on. The thing that worried him was that the monitor was sick, and holding out with difficulty. Should he give up, should he falter for a moment, out would rush these intolerable things—only Anthony could know what a state of blackness there would be if the worst of him could roam his consciousness unchecked.
The heat of the day had changed, somehow, until it was a burnished darkness crushing down upon a devastated land. Over his head the blue circles of ominous uncharted suns, of unnumbered centres of fire, revolved interminably before his eyes as though he were lying constantly exposed to the hot light and in a state of feverish coma. At seven in the morning something phantasmal, something almost absurdly unreal that he knew was his mortal body, went out with seven other prisoners and two guards to work on the camp roads. One day they loaded and unloaded quantities of gravel, spread it, raked it—the next day they worked with huge barrels of red-hot tar, flooding the gravel with black, shining pools of molten heat. At night, locked up in the guard-house, he would lie without thought, without courage to compass thought, staring at the irregular beams of the ceiling overhead until about three o’clock, when he would slip into a broken, troubled sleep.
During the work hours he labored with uneasy haste, attempting, as the day bore toward the sultry Mississippi sunset, to tire himself physically so that in the evening he might sleep deeply from utter exhaustion…. Then one afternoon in the second week he had a feeling that two eyes were watching him from a place a few feet beyond one of the guards. This aroused him to a sort of terror. He turned his back on the eyes and shovelled feverishly, until it became necessary for him to face about and go for more gravel. Then they entered his vision again, and his already taut nerves tightened up to the breaking-point. The eyes were leering at him. Out of a hot silence he heard his name called in a tragic voice, and the earth tipped absurdly back and forth to a babel of shouting and confusion.
When next he became conscious he was back in the guard-house, and the other prisoners were throwing him curious glances. The eyes returned no more. It was many days before he realized that the voice must have been Dot’s, that she had called out to him and made some sort of disturbance. He decided this just previous to the expiration of his sentence, when the cloud that oppressed him had lifted,
