in january, 1917, it began to occur to tom whitelaw that he might have to go and fight. he might possibly be killed. worse than that, he might be crippled or blinded or otherwise rendered helpless.
he had followed the war hitherto as one who looks on at tragedies which have nothing to do with himself. europe was to him no more than a geographical term. intense where his own aims and duties were concerned, but lacking the imaginative faculty, he had never been able to take england, france, and germany as realities. the horrors of which he read in newspapers moved him less than a big human story on the stage. that the struggle might suck him into itself, smashing him as a tornado smashes a tree, came home to him first at a sunday evening supper with the ansleys.
"if it does come," philip ansley said, complacently, "a lot of you young fellows will have to go and be shot up."
"i'm on," guy announced readily. "if it hadn't been for the family i'd have enlisted in canada long ago."
his mother took this seriously. "well that, thank god, can't happen to us. darling, with your—"
"oh, yes, with my fat! same old bunk! but,
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mother, i'm losing weight like a snowbank in april. it's running away. i'm exercising; i'm taking turkish baths; i don't hardly eat a damn thing. i weighed two-fifty-three six weeks ago, and now i'm down to two-forty-nine."
"don't worry," his father assured him. "you'll get there. you'll make a fine target for big bertha. couldn't miss you any more than she would a whole platoon."
"philip, how can you!"
"oh, they're all crazy to go." he looked toward tom. "suppose you are too. exactly the big husky type they like to blow into hash."
turning to help himself from the dish pilcher happened to be passing, tom's eyes encountered hildred's. seated beside him, she had veered round on hearing her father's words. the alarm in her face was a confession.
"oh, i can wait," he tried to laugh. "if i've got to go i will, but i'm not tumbling over myself to get there."
a half hour later mrs. ansley and the three younger members of the party were in the music room, where guy was at the piano. the mother sat on a gilded french canapé, making an excuse for keeping hildred beside her. tom had already begun to guess that the friendship between hildred and himself was making mrs. ansley uneasy. for all these years she had taken him as guy's protégé with whom "anything of that kind" was impossible. but lately she had so maneuvered as not to leave hildred and himself alone. whether hildred noticed it or
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not he couldn't tell, since she never made a counter-move. if she was not unconscious of her mother's strategy she let it appear as if she was.
all the while guy chimed out the carillon de cythère of couperin le grand mrs. ansley patted hildred's hand, and rejoiced in her two children. guy's touch was velvety because it was guy's; couperin le grand was a noble composer because guy played him. her amorphous person quivered to the measure, with a tremor here and a dilation there, like the contraction and expansion of a medusa floating in the sea.
but when guy had tinkled out the final notes she bubbled to her feet.
"darling, i don't think i ever heard you play as well as you're doing this winter. i think if you were to give a private recital...."
in the general movement tom lost the rest of this suggestion, but caught on again at a whisper which he overheard.
"hildred, i simply must go and take my corsets off. i've had them on ever since i dressed for church. it's nellie's evening out. i'll have to ask you to come and help me."
but as her mother was kissing guy good-night hildred managed to say beneath her breath, "don't go away. i'll try to come back. there's something i want to speak about."
left to themselves, the two young men exchanged bits of college gossip while guy twirled on the piano stool. they had the more to say to each other since they met less often than in their year at gore hall.
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guy was now in westmorley court, and tom in one of the cheaper residential halls in the yard. their associations would have tended to put them apart, had not guy's need of moral strengthening, to say nothing of a dog-like loyalty, driven him back at irregular intervals upon his old friend. now and then, too, when his mother insisted on his coming home for the sunday evening meal, hildred suggested that he bring tom.
"let's hike it in by the embankment," was guy's way of extending this invitation. "i don't mind if you come along, and hildred likes it. dad don't care one way or another. he isn't democratic like hildred and me; but he's only a snob when it comes to his position as one of the grand panjandrums of boston. mother kicks, of course; but then she'd accept the devil himself if i was to tote him behind me."
long usage had enabled tom to translate these sentiments into terms of eagerness. guy really wanted him. he was guy's haven of refuge as truly as when they had been growing boys. every few weeks guy turned from his "bunch of sports," or his "bunch of sports" left him in the lurch, so that he came back like a homing pigeon to its roost. tom was fond of him, was sorry for him, bore with him. moreover, beyond these tactless invitations there was hildred.
they fell to talking of tad whitelaw. guy swung round to the piano, beating out a few bars of throbbing, deep-seated grief.
"one more little song and dance and tad'll get this. know what it is?"
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confessing that he didn't know, tom learned that it was händel's dead march in "saul."
"played at all the british military funerals, to make people who feel bad enough already feel a damn sight worse. be our morning and evening hymn when we get into the trenches."
tom was anxious. "you mean that tad's on probation?"
"i don't know what he's on. hear the dean's been giving him a dose of kill-or-cure. that's all." he pounded out the heartbreaking chords, with the deep bass note that sounded like a drum. "ever see a fellow named thorne carstairs?"
"seen him, yes. don't know him. yale chap, isn't he?"
"was." the drumbeat struck sorrow to the soul. "kicked out. hanging round tad till he gets him kicked out too. lives at tuxedo. stacks of dough, just like tad himself." there was some personal injury in guy's tone, as he added, "like to give him the toe of my boot."
it was perhaps this feat of energy that sent him into the martial phrases of the chopin polonaise in a major, making the room ring with joyous bravery.
having dropped into mrs. ansley's corner of the gilded canapé, tom found hildred silently slipping into a seat beside him.
"no, don't get up." she put her hand on his arm in a way she had never done before. "i can only stay a few minutes. there's something i want to say."
guy was passing to the d major movement. his back was turned to them. they sat gazing at each
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other. they sat gazing at each other in a new kind of avowal. all the things he dared not say and she dared not listen to were poured from the one to the other through their eyes. she spoke hurriedly, breathlessly.
"i want you to know that if we enter the war, and you're sent over there, i'll find a way to go too."
he began some kind of protest, but she silenced him.
"i know how i could do it. there's a woman in paris who'd take me on to work with her. you see, i'm used to europe. you're not. i can't bear to think of you—with no family—so far away from everyone—and all alone. i'll go."
before he could seize anything like the full import of what she was telling him she had slipped away again. guy was still playing, martially and majestically.
tom sat wrapt in a sudden amazed tranquillity. now that she had told him, told him more, far more, than was in her words, he was not surprised; he was only reassured. he realized that it was what he had expected. he had not expected it in the mind, nor precisely with the heart. if the heart has reasons which the reason doesn't know, it was something beyond even these. the nearest he could come to it, now that he tried to express it by the processes of thought, was that between him and her there existed a community of life which they had only to take for granted. she was taking it for granted. to find out if she loved him he would never have to ask her; she would never have to ask him. they knew! he
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wondered if the knowledge brought to her the peace it brought to him. he felt that he knew that too.
having ended his polonaise, guy let his fingers run restlessly up and down the keys. he had not turned round; he had heard nothing; he hadn't guessed that hildred had come and gone. that was their secret. they would keep it as a secret. one of them at least had no wish to make it known.
he had no wish that it should go farther, even between him and her, till the future had so shaped itself that he could be justified. that it should remain as it was, unspoken but understood, would for a long, long time to come be joy and peace for them both.
suddenly guy broke into a strain enraptured and exultant. it flung itself up on the air as easily as a bird's note. it was lyric gladness, welling from a heart that couldn't tire.
caught by his own jubilance, guy took up the melody in a tenor growing liquid and strong after the years of cracked girlishness.
"guy, for heaven's sake, what's that?"
the singer cut into his song long enough to call back over his shoulder:
"schumann! 'to the beloved'!"
he began singing again, his head thrown back, his big body swaying. all the longing for love of a fellow on the edge of twenty, but for him made shamefaced by his fat, found voice in that joyousness.
tom had not supposed that in the whole round of the universe there was such expression for his nameless ecstasies. it was not guy whom he heard, nor
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the piano; it was the morning stars singing together; it was the sons of god shouting for joy; it was all the larks and all the thrushes and all the nightingales that in all the ages had ever trilled to the sun and moon.
"don't stop," he shouted, when the song had mounted to its close. "let's have it all over again."
so they had it all over again, the one in his wordless, mumbled tenor, and the other singing in his heart.
