The Love Story of Edwin Binns

by I. A. R. Wylie

 

THE LOVE STORY
of
EDWIN BINNS
By
I. A. R. WYLIE

LIEUTENANT OSWALD and his brother-in-arms, Second Lieutenant Somers, stood together on the steps of the base hospital. They were both what may be described as “artistically wounded”—that is to say, Lieutenant Oswald's right arm rested in a neat black sling, and a white bandage across Second Lieutenant Somers' brow, far from detracting from that young gentleman's undeniable good looks, lent them an additional and martial distinction. As he observed himself: “They both looked as if they'd come out of an idiotic novelette.”

“Still, it's good to think we aren't scrapped,” he added, fearful that the unseen powers that govern the destinies of second lieutenants might mistake his remark for a complaint. “We'll be back in a month.”

“And it's good to think we shall have a glimpse of 'em at home,” remarked Oswald, who, being married, saw the thing from two, not to say three, points of view. “They'll be glad, by Jove!”

Somers nodded.

“By Jove, yes!” he agreed, and added reminiscently: “Poor old mater!”

Both were silent. Though feigning indifference, after the manner of their kind, their eyes wandered persistently down the long, muddy road that led to the station, and as a horseman appeared suddenly around the distant bend, both simultaneously threw away their cigarettes, and then, perceiving that they had betrayed themselves, searched their pockets for a fresh supply.

“Beastly late, isn't he?” Somers grumbled.

“You can't expect your mail with your shaving water,” Oswald grinned. “Anyhow, you'll soon be able to answer in person, old chap.”

As they waited, a third man joined them. They did not notice him at first, and he stood awkwardly apart, watching the dilatory horseman with a moody interest. His accidental isolation was accentuated by something in his personality. It was a “something” at once subtle and flagrant. Though he wore the same uniform, the same badges, as the two men in front of him, he looked as if he had been cast in a different mold, and not even the democratic, all-leveling khaki could conceal the fact. He was small, neatly made enough, and his kit proclaimed the Bond Street military tailor at the top of its voice. The difference expressed itself most clearly, perhaps, in the small waxed mustache, in the red, clumsy-looking hand that caressed it, and in his whole attitude of forced ease. But for the merciful uniform, he might have been a shop assistant posing for his photograph.

Presently he coughed affectedly, and Somers glanced around.

“Hello, Binns; that you?” he asked, with good-natured fatuity. “Looking for letters?”

“Yes.” The answer sounded at once sullen and pleased, as if the man had not expected to be spoken to. “It's all the excitement one gets in this beastly hole.”

“There's excitement enough elsewhere for any one who likes it,” Oswald remarked carelessly. “Now, then, sergeant, what's the bag?”

The amateur postman swung himself off his horse and saluted with a grin.

“I've got a nice little lot 'ere for you, sir. I thought you'd be waiting.”

“Thanks. By Jove, how's that for a nice haul! Look at it, Somers, you poor, neglected oaf!”

“Just you wait till you see mine! Hurry up, sergeant! Think of those poor blighters inside with their temperature racing up the thermometer with longing for you! There, look at that! Only three! Fickleness, thy name is woman!”

The sergeant's grin persisted as he gathered up his mail bags. It was obvious that he appreciated his position as benign and beneficent deity, but as he turned toward the doorway, he stiffened.

“No, sir; nothing for you to-day.”

He passed on. Binns whistled between his teeth with a clumsy, school-boy assumption of indifference, and held his ground as if the arrival of the mail had been only one of his reasons for lingering. Oswald, absorbed though he was in his own correspondence, looked up at him.

“Bad luck!”

Binns laughed loudly.

“I'm getting accustomed to it. I've only had one letter since I've been out here—and that was from the girl I was engaged to, saying she'd broken off the engagement. Jolly, eh?”

The outbreak was on a level with the waxed mustache. It was inexpressibly vulgar, and neither of the two men knew what to do with it. In sheer awkwardness, Somers became facetious.

“Why don't you stick an ad in the Times?” he suggested. “'Lonely young officer would be glad——' and so forth. You'd get shoals of answers. Here, have a look at the papers and tell us how the war's getting on.”

He tossed a neatly folded packet across, and Binns caught it reluctantly. A dull, angry flush had crept into his face, but he did not speak again. And presently the two men wandered off together, leaving him seated on the steps, his too immaculate head bent over the paper. Somers did not ask for its return.

“Queer chap!” he observed carelessly. “What's he doing here? He isn't wounded, is he?”

“No. He was taken ill in the trenches.”

Oswald's tone suggested finality, but Somers had the persistency of youth and innocence.

“Ill?” he queried.

“Sick—sick as a dog.”

“What? You don't mean—funk?”

“Good Lord—no!” Oswald frowned irritably. “But they had to send him back. I don't think they know what to do with him. They're trying to get him an exchange. Clerical work, you know.”

“Then it was——”

“Oh, shut up!” Oswald put in firmly. “Shut up!”

 

The next day, as the two men were boarding the train bound for some nameless French port, Somers felt a touch on his arm. He turned and saw Binns at his side—Binns flushed, panting, and almost disarrayed.

“I say, would you mind——”

“What? Posting it? Not a bit.”

“I'll give you the penny when——”

Somers escaped into the carriage.

“I won't forget. Good luck!”

As the train steamed out of the station, he glanced casually at the envelope that had been thrust into his hand, and whistled to himself. Then, conscious that he had committed an indiscretion, he thrust the letter hurriedly into his pocket.

“It takes all sorts to make a world,” he remarked philosophically and apparently apropos of nothing in particular.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Edwin Binns stood on the platform and watched the train disappear. He was still panting, and in the moment of heat and excitement seemed less vulgar. As he became conscious, however, that he was not the sole occupant of the station, he drew himself up, fingered his mustache, and strode off, at once shame-faced and inexpressibly self-satisfied.

A little group of Tommies, busy unloading, looked up, and though they had never set eyes on him before, they winked solemnly at one another as he passed.

II.

It was a week later, at the Piccadilly, during the tea hour. Somers, who had chanced upon an antiquated number of the Times, had been looking down the “killed in actsons,” and his eyes passed on naturally to the “agony column.”

“Well, I never!” he said.

“What's that?” Oswald asked.

They were waiting for Oswald's sister, who, so the joke ran in the family circle, had never kept an appointment punctually, not even at her birth, and both were rather irritably occupied with the papers.

“Oh, nothing,” Oswald returned awkwardly.

“Well, you are an aggravating chap! What is it?”

Somers folded the Times neatly, and stowed it away in his coat pocket.

“There's your sister looking for us,” he said, with the unshakable urbanity displayed by nurses toward too inquisitive charges. “We'd better go and meet her.”

Thus it came about that Oswald never saw the brief notice in the agony column, and did not take his junior's jump to a somewhat unwarranted conclusion.

The notice ran as follows:

A lonely and unpopular young officer at the front would be grateful if some one would write to him occasionally, Address Box 257, the Times.

At the same moment that Somers had made the above discovery, Lieutenant Edwin Binns entered his garret in the base hospital “somewhere in France.” “Garret” is perhaps an ungrateful term. In the hospital the place was regarded as privileged, but architecturally there is no other way of describing it. It had been allotted to Binns under various pretexts. The medical officer in charge said that his complaint—it had a long name—would have a better chance in comparative solitude. It was not suggested, however, that Binns should be invalided home. The garret was, in point of fact, in the nature of a respite and a last chance.

Edwin Binns sat down on the camp bed under the slope of the roof. A candle burned on a rickety little table beside him, and its unsteady flicker accentuated the nervous quiver at the corners of the unformed mouth beneath the overwaxed mustache. He was breathing quickly, as if he had been running, and there was something sullenly exultant about him that was not attractive.

He held an unopened letter in his hand. The writing on the envelope was feminine and very neat. The Times had added the address, but the feminine handwriting dominated by its exquisiteness and character. Lieutenant Binns sneered a little and ripped the envelope roughly open.

My Dear Undesirable: That's what you would have me call you, I feel sure! I never thought I should write intimately to any one whose very name was unknown to me—least of all to a “young and unpopular officer”—but many strange things have happened lately, and it seems to me that I shall never be really surprised again.

When I first saw your notice, I smiled a little. It was so Byronic in its bitterness. You need not have wasted the word “young.” In my mind's eye I could just see you waiting for letters that never came, gloomy and cynical, and hating every one because “no one loved you.” At first I was just amused. I thought so many nice women would take pity on you. And then, after a little—I must confess my imaginary picture of you haunted me—I grew less amused. Nowadays every one seems to have some one, and I thought how really lonely—yes, and unloved—a man must be to whom no one writes, and who is driven to put such a notice in the paper—as you were. Unless, of course, it is just a joke; in which case, you will have a good laugh over me.

But I am a woman, and sentimental, and I am taking you seriously. I feel, perhaps, that among the many who will answer you, I may be able to understand you best. Will you write and tell me about yourself? Tell me why you are lonely and unpopular. Count me as an invisible friend. I will be one to you if you need me.

The letter ended abruptly with the signature “Fanny Desmond,” and underneath—written very small, as if the writer had been shy of her own question—were the words: “Have you no people—no mother to write to you?”

For many minutes Edwin Binns sat quite motionless, with the letter in his hand, staring at it. The sneer had died from his lips, and the truculence had gone out of him. He looked like a clumsy, overgrown schoolboy whose roughness has been rebuked by an unexpected gentleness. Then he got up and threw the letter to one side.

“Rot!” he said aloud.

He went over to the window, and, unfastening his Sam Brown belt, hung it up on a convenient nail. As he stood there a light flashed in the darkness outside, and he could hear the pur of a heavy car feeling its way cautiously along the muddy road. The sound held him. He recognized it. Every night it was there—so ordinary, so hideously ordinary! The London streets were full of it, but here, in this place, it had its own grim significance. Every little jolt, every little break in that purring rhythm, meant something—and the black shadow behind the winking eye of light was full of an unnamable, unthinkable horror.

The ambulance.

Edwin Binns drew the curtain sharply across the window. He was shivering, and a cold sweat stood out on his white forehead. He went to the table, and, pulling out paper from a drawer, sat down to write. He began several times, and several times tore up what he had written. The crumpled-up letter in the neat handwriting lay beside him, and he unfolded and reread it. After that, he wrote quickly, yet jerkily, pausing every now and then as if his words came with an effort.

Dear Miss Desmond: It was lucky for me you didn't leave it to the other “nice women.” It seems they were all too nice to risk having anything to do with anything so questionable as an “undesirable.” So yours was my only letter—the second I've had since I've been out here.

I dare say you were right to laugh at me, but it's been pretty beastly. One feels the loneliness worse out here than anywhere in the world, and I haven't deserved it more than other fellows. I put “unpopular” in my ad because I wanted people to understand that I wasn't joking. But I'm not what you might think. I haven't done anything to deserve the cold shoulder as I get it.

The whole trouble is that I'm just a square peg in a round hole. My father has a furniture shop in the North, and this is a smart regiment. Everybody's somebody except me. They took me because I'd money and they'd had awful losses, but they can't forgive me the shop. If you know anything about military folk, you'll understand. I didn't care so long as I was out in the trenches—then I had my men, who didn't mind what I was so long as I was a man—but I got wounded trying to pull some poor fellow out of the enemy's fire, and now I'm stuck here by myself.

I haven't any one to write to me. My father's busy, and he didn't want me to go. Helen, my fiancée, has broken off our engagement. She was pleased enough to see me in my uniform, but she didn't like being left alone, and now she's picked up with some rotter who's skulking at home. I've never looked at another girl, so now I haven't a soul. That's the whole story. I got sick of being the only one never to get a letter, and so I put the ad in the paper. Will you write again? I'd be awfully grateful if you would. It's made me feel quite jolly again. My wound doesn't bother half so much.

He signed the letter hurriedly as if it hurt him, and added: “My mother died years ago,” as a postscript.

Then suddenly, to his own amazement, Lieutenant Edwin Binns dropped forward with his face on the smeared sheets of paper, and cried bitterly like a child.

III.

The sergeant was a man well able to conceal his feelings on ordinary occasions, but for once in his life the surprise was too much for him, and he expressed himself briefly but emphatically:

“Bless me; if you 'aven't got the lot, sir!”

It was not strictly true, but the facts justified the exaggeration. Edwin Binns stood in the hospital vestibule and stared at the collection on the table in front of him. There were square letters and oblong letters, neat handwritings and scrawls, and actually one package of portentous shape. Edwin Binns picked out the one envelope with the prim yet graceful inscription. His hand shook a little, and there was a mist before his eyes that reminded him of that black hour under shrapnel when he had known fear.

“Thank you, sergeant—thanks awfully——”

The sergeant looked at him from under beetling brows. For the moment he disliked the little upstart lieutenant a degree less. The thanks had come spontaneously, almost humbly, and there had been no spurious self-confidence in the boy's eager bearing.

“Blessed if 'e 'asn't got a girl, after all!” the sergeant thought, as he made his way to the first ward. “Well, I wish 'er luck of 'im!”

Edwin Binns went out onto the steps of the hospital. It was drizzling miserably, but he did not know it. He was only conscious of the fresh air against his burning face and of an exquisite relief, as if a weight had been lifted from his oppressed lungs. He sat down on the low parapet and tore open the delicate mauve envelope.

My Dear, Unhappy Undesirable: Shall I begin by telling you that I saw and recognized the stains on your letter to me—and that I cried over them? You had a right to your tears, for you had your sorrows, and I had a right to mine because I am a woman, with a woman's rather terrible power of making the sufferings of others her own. And now I am so glad I overcame my shyness at writing to an unknown young man, for what I felt instinctively is really true. I can help you a little because I understand. You are very lonely, and I am very lonely. I have lost every one I care for, and if anything happened to me to-morrow, I do not think many tears would be shed. Isn't that a bond between us?

You see, I am writing quite frankly about myself, too. Loneliness isn't always a fault—sometimes it's just chance. It's like that in your case, isn't it? Or perhaps you are a little to blame—over-sensitive, shy, always looking for offense? Do you carry “the shop” about with you in your thoughts? I can't believe any one else would ever think about it. “After all, every man who fights for his country is a gentleman. That's how I look at it. And you fought bravely. One short line in your letter thrilled me. And, do you know, I was just a little proud, as if you were indeed my friend and I could claim the reflected glory of your valor? So you see you are not alone any more, and our friendship is already beginning to be a real thing.

As to Helen, your fiancée—one day she will understand what she has done and be ashamed. Perhaps she will come back, and, if she is worthy of you, I pray that she will—but, indeed, my own heart is sore against her. You did your duty, and a true woman understands duty as well as any man. And if she is not a true woman, I begrudge her your loyalty.

Dear Undesirable, I have made a picture of you in my mind. I see you as very boyish looking, with a round face and pink cheeks and rather sullen blue eyes. Not handsome at all—just a simple, straightforward boy—a boy any woman would be glad to call her son. Do you think me very sentimental? But there can be so little sentiment out there in your grim world that perhaps no harm is done.

If you write again, tell me about your wound and the poor fellow you tried to save. Also tell me if there is anything you need. I have sent you all sorts of funny little offerings to-day—under disguised handwritings—so that the “other fellows” might turn green with jealousy——

Edwin Binns crunched the letter in his hand. He had seen the surgeon major in charge of the hospital coming up the steps, and he rose sharply to his feet, saluting, with the blood hammering in his temples and the old mist before his eyes.

The major returned the salute, made as if to pass on, and then came to a standstill, measuring the younger man with a cold intentness.

“How are you feeling?”

“Pretty fit, thanks, sir.”

“Fit to go back to the regiment?”

There was a second's pause. Binns' eyes flickered.

“That's for you to say, sir.”

The surgeon major turned his head away.

“I'm not so sure. A man knows his own constitution best. Anyhow, we can't keep you here much longer. You're not wounded, and we haven't any room to spare. Besides—the men will begin to wonder. At the same time, it is not desirable for you or us that you should be taken ill again—in the trenches.”

The blood receded from Edwin Binns' cheeks, and then flowed back, mounting in a dark flood to his fair brows.

“No—sir.”

“I dare say I could get you your discharge—or, at any rate, an exchange into a home force—on account of nervous disability. It could be done if you wished it.” There was no answer. “Well, think it over. I can give you ten days to decide.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The major nodded in his direction without looking at him, and went on his way into the hospital.

Edwin Binns sat down again on the balustrade. He still held the letter crunched in his hand, but he did not look at it. His round, rather foolish face had a curious stupefied expression, as if he had been struck between the eyes.

The dusk added itself to the somberness of the low-hanging, saturated sky. Through the gray sheets of rising mist, the lights of an approaching motor twinkled warmly. Edwin Binns did not see them. He did not hear the pur of the engines until it was so close that the grim-shaped vehicle already stood at the hospital steps. Two nurses glided past him. There was the sound of doors being swung open—muffled voices, the soft, easy slide of a stretcher being drawn out. Then steps—cunning, carefully calculated steps. Four ghostly figures drew slowly out of the mist into the yellow light of the open doorway, bearing between them a white burden of terrible immobility and silence.

Edwin Binns crouched farther back, but the wounded man's face was toward him, and they saw each other. Edwin Binns put his hand to his mouth as if to stifle an irrepressible exclamation, but the white, tortured face expressed nothing—not even recognition.

Then the silent, pitiful procession passed on into the night.

IV.

You mustn't write to me again. Not that you'll want to when you've read this. My last letter was just a pack of lies—a lot of humbug to keep me from going off my head with shame. Now, I'm going to tell you the truth. I've got to. If you had written differently, I might have gone on with it—now I can't.

I want to tell you that I deserve all I get. I put “unpopular” in my ad in a fit of decency. I wanted people to know what they were in for—now I'm going on with it. It's only fair. Yours was such a sweet letter. When I got it, I thought at first it would be just a silly schoolgirl sort of thing, and I felt what an ass I'd been ever to want it. But as I've told you—I'm the only fellow who doesn't get something by every mail, and even the sergeant used to smother a grin when I asked him if there was anything for me. He looked small to-day, though—and jolly surprised. He hates me. They all do. You will, too—when I've told you everything. But there! I'm getting incoherent. I'd better get on with it.

For one thing—I'm common. It's not my father's shop—it's me. I'm a bounder. I know I am. I look one—though I spent any amount on my kit—and everything I do is bounderish. It just oozes out of me. And I fake it worse by swanking horribly. My letter to you was all swank. I wanted to make out I was something different—rather a fine, misunderstood sort of chap—and I pulled it off. But I can't deceive the fellows here. It's not the shop they mind. They're not prigs. If I had fought decently—but I didn't.

I'm not wounded. It's awfully hard to tell you—but I broke down in the trenches—was so sick with sheer funk that they had to carry me off on a stretcher. Now they've got me here. Of course every one knows. My sub was brought in to-day with a bullet through his shoulder, and he wouldn't recognize me.

Even Helen guessed. I lied about her, too. She's the finest, straightest girl on earth. It was she who made me join. I didn't want to go—I'm not the fighting sort—but I had to choose between her and shirking. So I went. But it was no good. I didn't even try to deceive her—somehow one can't lie to the people one cares for—and she broke it off. I was awfully fond of her—you don't know how fond—and it's been pretty hard to feel that I shan't ever see her again—or anything. I think that makes it worse—to feel that no one cares a brass farthing. I'm an awfully selfish brute, but I'd be glad if some one would be sorry if anything happened. But of course no one could now.

I don't know what's going to be done to me. I didn't actually run away—but I should run if I got the chance, and they know it. So they're giving me the chance to clear out altogether, instead. If I do, it's the end of everything~and if I don't——

Anyhow, now you know what sort of fellow I am, and you can drop me like a hot coal. I shall quite understand. I didn't mean to tell you all this—but I can't humbug you. It's cost a lot. I'd have liked to be able to, think of you as an “invisible friend,” but I can't any more now. But I'm awfully grateful for what you've done. And though I shall tear your letters up, as I know you will wish, I shan't ever forget.

He signed “Edwin Binns,” and folded the letter with a steady hand. looked stiff and gray, with all the youthful foolishness stamped out of it.

V.

The neat handwriting had lost its primness. It hurried across the delicately tinted note paper in quick, unsteady lines, as if the hand that held the pen had lost its cunning.

You mustn't clear out. You must go back to the regiment—to the trenches—and prove yourself a man. I do not believe that you are a coward. You would not have written to me as you did if you had been a coward—you would have gone on pretending. But you are so young. You didn't know what death looked like—and it is harder for some to face than it is for others.

If I had been Helen, I would have given you another chance. I would have been romantic and silly and given you my gage to carry into the thick of battle. I would have called upon the best in you with all the strength of my love.

Dear, unhappy boy, keep my letters if they are of any value to you. Carry them with you when you go back—as you will go back. For you won't disappoint me. I have had so many disappointments. Lately they have weighed heavily on me. All the other women in the world—so it seemed to me—had husbands or sons or brothers or lovers, of whom they might think with pride, for whom they might pray and work, whom they might remember. Yes, even those who had only memory seemed enviable to me. I had no one.

Now I have you. All the tenderness and pity and pride that I have carried useless in my heart I have given to you. You will not disappoint me. You will give me the right to pray for you, to glow with pride for you, even—if God wills—to mourn for you. We will look death in the face together, and not flinch. We will not pretend that it is easy, but we will go on. Will it make the fight easier if I tell you that I care, that whatever you are, whatever you have been, I am your friend—in the proud thought of what you will be.

You are chivalrous, or you would not have hesitated to lie to me to the bitter end. You will not destroy a woman's trust in you.

The door of the garret opened abruptly, and Edwin Binns lifted his eyes from the letter in his hand. Then he got up. The major nodded to him.

“I was on my rounds,” he said, “and I thought I'd look you up. There's a batch of 'cures' going back to the trenches to-morrow, and it's up to you to decide whether you will go with them or accept my suggestion.”

Edwin Binns returned the elder man's gaze without flinching. His clenched hand rested on the letter spread out on the table beside him.

“I would like to rejoin my regiment at once, sir.”

“You mean it?”

“Yes.”

“You are quite sure that——”

“I am quite sure that I shall return differently or not at all.”

The major turned to go, then came back. He seemed to have lost his chilly self-assurance and to have become gruff and awkward. Abruptly he held out his hand.

“Well—I wish you luck!” he said.

VI.

The hospital “scratch band” broke into a swinging march and filled the air with vigor and color.

Where he sat before his rickety table, Edwin Binns could hear the tramp of feet and eager voices calling to one another. It reminded him curiously of the breaking-up day at his old school, and he felt his pulses stir with an almost joyful excitement. And yet what they were going out to meet was the thing he feared; not death—that was less terrible—but fear itself—the vast, intangible unknown.

He glanced at the little pile of neatly written letters at his side, and then, as if the sight of them inspired him, he sat forward and began to write in a dashing, sprawling, boyish hand:

They are playing us off grandly—such a jolly row! They're all amateurs. And the men are singing and whistling as if it were a school treat. In a quarter of an hour we shall be marched off. So this is perhaps my last letter to you. I have your letters here beside me, and in a minute I shall stow them away in my breast pocket and carry them with me to death or honor. I'm sorry if this sounds silly and romantic—but this is the romance of my life.

I've one thing to say to you before I go—and I dare say it because I am going. If I end decently—if I am less of a rotter and more of a man—it's because of you.

I've never seen you. I've made my picture of you—some one small and delicate, yet strong, with gray eyes and a sweet mouth and brown hair with lights in it. You may not be a bit like this—it makes no difference. I owe you everything—it's as if you had made me. And so I love you. You have given me your tenderness and pity—I give you all I am and have. Even now I won't pretend anything. It's not the love I gave the woman I was to have married—that I can't give to any one again. What I feel for you is something different—less and more—I don't know which. I only know that I thank God for you.

And so I am writing to ask you—if I return honorably, if I behave like a man—may I try to make you care for me? I would not dare ask you this, but you spoke of your loneliness and that gave me courage. If I could make you less lonely, if I could pay you back a little the comfort you have given me—if I only could!

The bugle is calling. I shall not get your answer until things are settled for me one way or the other—or perhaps never. But the hope and dream of you will be with me always. You must not laugh at me if I tell you something—I feel like a knight-errant, and I carry my lady's gage against my heart. Please God I shall not fail her!

He closed the envelope quickly, thrust the letters into his pocket, and pulled open the door. The tramp of feet was still now, the voices silent. In the road outside the hospital, a hundred men stood at attention.

Some one touched Edwin Binns on the shoulder. He turned and saw the pale, pain-wrought face of his old sub close beside him.

“I crawled out to—to wish you luck,” the boy whispered. “I heard you were off, and I gave the poultice major the slip——”

“That was brickish of you.”

“Not a bit. Shall I give your letter to post?”

“Thanks awfully.”

“So long!”

“So long!”

That was all. They shook hands. In the boy's eyes there was a vague understanding—a vague regret. Edwin Binns carried himself well. Two men had given him their hands—two men who knew. They, too, were giving him another chance.

The band broke out into a jolly, somewhat jolly version of “Tipperary.” There was a hoarse cheer from a window where a crowd of convalescents had gathered, in defiance of law, military and otherwise.

Edwin Binns took his place at the head of the company. For the first time he was conscious of his oneness with these men. He no longer stood alone, isolated by the hidden specter. They belonged to each other—they to him, and he to them.

“Forward—march!”

“The poultice major,” in his white coat, fresh from the operating table, saluted from the steps. And Edwin Binns took the salute proudly, almost gayly.

VII.

The man talked incessantly. He was in great pain, and the nurse knew that until the moment came for the merciful hypodermic injection, there was no use in trying to silence him. Moreover, his ten listeners, in their ten neat white beds, denied her authority. Their faces, deep in shadow, peered out toward the talker with a pathetic wistfulness, an utter self-forgetfulness that was stronger than suffering. The nurse shifted the light so that its yellow rays fell farther away from them. Then, with a trained deftness, she moved the garrulous one's pillows, easing his position. He groaned an involuntary thanks.

“Th' parsons don't need to talk no more to us about 'ell,” he said in his loud, rasping voice of pain. “We knows better than they—we've been there. Three days of it, my Gawd, with the fire of it burstin' over our 'eads, and the slush of it up to our knees, and the rats gnawin' at our vitals. Three days and not so much as a crust! At the end we was drinkin' the puddles, 'cause they tasted of somethin'—but it didn't 'elp much. Some of the chaps were so 'weak they couldn't 'old their 'ands up. It weren't no joke.”

“They should 'ave sent up the reserves,” a voice growled out of the shadow. “Mortal flesh won't stand it, it won't.”

“Ours did.” The wounded man turned his head in the direction of the speaker. “And wot do you know about reserves, you bloomin' body snatcher?” he added irritably. “You can't do no conjurin' tricks with reserves. If reserves ain't there—well, they ain't there and there's an end of it. Besides, we was cut off, so to speak. The order to retire 'adn't got to us, and it's my belief we'd been forgotten. A 'undred men or so ain't so noticeable as you'd think when there's millions at it, and there'd been a bit of a muddle all round.

“Any'ow, there we was. First and second days we 'adn't time to breathe comfortably. 'Eaven knows 'ow many times the beggars came on at us, and more than once it was an 'and-to-'and scuffle in the trenches. But we pushed 'em back some'ow. Then, oh the third day, it occurred to them they could do it cheaper. They got our range with their artillery——” He paused a moment, and the ten stirred restlessly.

“Well, go on, cawn't cher?”

“It ain't pleasant,” the narrator muttered. “It was a bull's-eye for 'em, and no mistake. In five minute 'alf of us was just blotted out. It was like a line of wet ink wot somebody's smeared their finger over. I got a bit of somethin' in me shoulder which knocked me silly for a bit. When I got me peeps clear again, I saw wot 'ad 'appened—but there weren't no time for cursing. T'other chaps was massin' for an attack, thinkin' we was wiped out, and our capting—'e was a man, 'e was, 'e said: 'Let 'em 'ave it, boys!' and we ups out of that trench and meets 'em 'alfway! My! That was a scrap—and not cheap, either. When we gets back, there weren't no capting. There weren't nothin' left us but a bloomin' little pipsqueak of a lieutenant wot 'ad——”

He stopped again, and the impatient voice broke out plaintively:

“Wot 'ad wot?”

“Never you mind!” The newcomer glanced scathingly in the direction of his tormentor. “You keep your nose out of the regiment's business, young feller. Any'ow, me and me pal we looks at each other, and me pal ses:

“'Wot's goin' to 'appen to us now? 'E ain't no good. Somebody'd better take 'im in 'and.'

“'Right!' ses I.

“So we wriggles up to the little lieutenant chap, and me pal ses nice and fatherlylike:

“‘'Adn't we better clear out of this before they catch us again, sir?'

“And 'e looks round and swears 'orrible.

“'You go to blazes, damn you!' ses 'e, 'but I ain't goin' to move out of this till I gets me orders.'

“Me and me pal we 'eard our jaws drop. It was like pickin' up a live bomb by mistake.

“'Right-o!' ses we, and we crawls back like woolly lambs.” He chuckled. “Five minutes later and Jack Johnson came tearing our way, and it was all over. I got a knock-out jab on me chin, and knew nothin' about nothin' till I woke up and found all our chaps round us. The reserves had come up just after the Jack Johnson and saved the trench. But there wasn't much left of us. A chap 'oo looked as though 'e was somebody and knew it came along and wanted to know wot we was and 'oo was the orficer in command, and our little pipsqueak, lookin' like nothin' livin', saluted with 'is left 'and—'is right seemed to 'ave been whisked off, so to speak—and toppled over as though 'is back 'ad snapped. 'E was a man, 'e was.”

A growl of assent came from the shadow.

“Don't see wot call you 'ave to call 'im a pipsqueak,” the opposition in the far corner persisted obstinately.

“'E was a pipsqueak,” the wounded man retorted, “but 'e became a man.” He thought a moment, and then added: “The Lord knows 'ow it 'appens—but it does 'appen, more often than you'd think, Mr. Body Snatcher.”

This time there was no answer. The door of the ward opened, and the doctor, followed by a night nurse, made his appearance. A silence of perfect innocence hovered over the suffering men. The nurse going off duty made her report, omitting the epic as recited by No. 354, and was about to take her departure when the doctor motioned her back.

“You might give No. 14 a look up,” he said in an undertone. “He's too apathetic. Humor him a bit. Give him the news and his letters if he wants them. He may sleep better for a little rousing.”

“Very well, sir. Shall I tell him about——”

“Yes, certainly.”

The nurse slipped down the passage to the smaller ward. Here were the serious cases, screened off from one another, and very silent, save now and then for an irrepressible sigh. Farthest from the door Edwin Binns lay, with his eyes fixed sightlessly on the ceiling. The shaded light threw a pale reflection on his upturned face. He was scarcely recognizable. The waxed mustache had vanished. The once round and ruddy cheeks were now white hollows, and the weak mouth had straightened into a line of pitiless repression. He seemed at once much older and much younger—much older in knowledge, much younger in his helplessness. As the nurse entered, he looked at her with a faint smile, and she came and sat down beside him, professionally cheerful and unemotional.

“Easier to-night?” she asked.

“Yes, thanks. But I shan't get my hand back.”

“No, I'm afraid not. But you did enough with it to satisfy most people.”

She waited a moment and then added, on the same steady, practical note: “You're mentioned in the dispatches, you know.”

He looked at her intently. She saw the color beat its way into his white face, but he said none of the things that men are supposed to say at such moments—neither “Rot!” or “Whatever for?” A look that was ineffable in its content dawned in his pain-haunted eyes.

“She'll be jolly glad,” he said. “I've prayed for it.”

The nurse looked at him wonderingly and placed two letters on his bed.

“They're congratulations, I expect. You may read them if you want to. Shall I open them?”

“Please—I can't. This beastly one-handed business! If there's one with neat, copperplate writing, give me that——”

“Yes, here you are.”

He took the open letter from her. There were two lines written across the single sheet:

When you come back, I will show you all I have to give you.

Edwin Binns smiled with a grave happiness. The letter slipped from his weak hold onto the counterpane, and he laid his hand upon it as if it had been something sacred.

“She's not like any other woman in the world,” he said dreamily. “She does things other women wouldn't do. And now she'll be so glad—so glad!”

The nurse nodded. She thought he had become light-headed in the fitful way common to men recovering from severe injuries.

“And your other letter?” she asked.

“Oh, read it to me,” he said indifferently.

The writing of the second letter was bold and vigorous and young. There was no superscription. The nurse read it in her clear, low voice:

I do not know whether you will want to hear from me again. When I think of my last letter, I feel it would be only fair if you have put me out of your life. And yet, in justice to you and to myself, I must write and admit the wrong I did you in my ignorance. I loved you—but I did not understand you. When I wrote as I did, I can honestly say I hurt myself most of all. I conceived it to be my duty. I felt, too, that there could be no real love between us if could suspect you as I did. Now, I know that I was wrong—wrong in my suspicion, wrong with regard to our love——

The nurse broke off. Edwin Binns, who for three weeks had lain as one dead, raised himself on his elbow and snatched the letter from her hand. For a moment she watched him. without alarm as he crouched there, his eyes devouring the closely written sheet with a passionate hunger. She believed in the efficacy of good news, and, woman-like, she thought she recognized the nature of the letter she had just read. But, as suddenly he fell back, she lost her sense of kindly certainty. The change in his face was something familiar and terrible. It was as if the feeble flame of his vitality had been stamped out. She bent over him, her hand on his, her fingers instinctively seeking for his pulse.

“Why—wasn't it, good news?” she whispered.

There was no answer for a moment. The beat under her fingers fluttered, and slowly, painfully, steadied. At length Edwin Binns looked up at her. His eyes had the stupid, dull look of those who have been mortally stricken.

“Yes—good news——” His lips moved soundlessly for a moment. “Only—too late.”

IX.

They sat opposite each other in the hotel lounge, with the table between them, and beyond the man's empty coat sleeve and the girl's pallor there was little to distinguish them from the usual “pairs” that are a characteristic of London hotel lounges at tea time. Only an interested observer would have noticed that the food before them was untouched, that they never smiled, and scarcely looked at each other. The man sat forward with his head bent. For some minutes there had been silence between them, and now he lifted his head with a curiously eloquent gesture of hopelessness.

“Perhaps I oughtn't to have asked for this,” he said. “It's awful for us two to sit here, knowing we care and that we shan't see each other again. But I had to have it out with you—before I saw her. I couldn't let you think I had changed like that—or that I was just paying you back. You do see that, don't you, Helen?”

“Of course.” She threw back her head a little, challenging her own weakness. “It's easier now. We can think of each other—and not feel bitter about it—or sorry we cared so much. I couldn't have borne that. Now I can——”

“Can you?” He tried to laugh, and failed tragically. “Oh, my dear, if it had only been a little different! If she had been different—some silly doll who didn't really care—but I know she's not that sort. If she had been—then I shouldn't be here—I shouldn't have seen you again. That's the awful irony of it. She's given you back to me. She's made me——”

“As I might have done,” the girl broke in with bitter self-reproach.

He shook his head.

“Oh, I don't know. Perhaps it was everything together—losing you and all that. I had to touch bottom first. Then she came and held out a helping hand. Helen, I've not deceived her. I told her I should love you above everything—always. But she believed it was all over between us—as I did. And she's lonely—desperately lonely. She's had a rotten time of it—I feel sure of that—and she was decent to me when I was pretty desperate. I couldn't go back on her now.”

“I know.” She got up suddenly, as if at the end of her strength. “Do you think I'm a cad? I wouldn't hurt her—no, not even for you. I'm grateful to her. Whatever she is, whatever she is like—she's made a man of you. She did what I couldn't—wouldn't do. She deserves happiness—I don't. That's all.” She held out her hand. “Please say good-by. There's nothing else we can—or ought—to say to each other. And it's almost intolerable——”

“I know, dear. It's been my rotten folly—my cowardice——”

“No, no, I'm proud of you.” She tried to smile. “She's made me proud of you. I owe her that.”

“Helen, you're wonderful—more wonderful than my dreams of you.”

“Then she's made us proud of each other—she's made us love each other more. That's the terrible part of it. And we mustn't meet again.”

“Helen—I shan't ever forget.”

“Try to. You owe it her.”

“I know. Good-by, then.”

Her lips moved, but no sound came from them. They looked at each other through a mist, not of tears, but of sheer physical exhaustion, as if the burden they carried had materialized. But outwardly they were palely composed. Thus they remained a moment until suddenly she dropped his hand and turned away. He watched her stupidly, and it was not till some time after she had disappeared in the crowded vestibule that he seemed to awaken to reality. But neither the waiter whom he tipped with a mad extravagance, nor the taxi driver who whirled him westward, noticed anything unusual about him. He was just an ordinary young man, living through the day's ordinary experiences.

Edwin Binns sat upright in the corner of his taxi, a sheet of note paper, covered with the delicate writing, pressed in his hand, and prayed desperately. He had not prayed in the trenches or, indeed, since his early childhood, and possibly he did not believe in prayer. But he had reached that limit of human strength when the veriest heathen dares no longer count on himself alone. For it is one thing to give up life—it is another to give up all that makes life worth living. And Edwin Binns, who had met death with cheerfulness, fought for the strength to face life decently, according to his lights.

The taxi drew up at the curb with a jolt, and Edwin Binns got out. The big house loomed up somberly before him, and it seemed to him that the old-fashioned bell rang through eternities of silence. An old woman, neatly dressed in black, with a white apron, opened the door to him.

“Is Miss Fanny Desmond at home?” he asked.

The old, weary eyes studied him curiously.

“Are you a friend of Miss Desmond's, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Then you haven't heard——”

“Heard? I only got home this morning.”

“Miss Desmond died last night, sir.”

A black veil dropped between his eyes and the old face in front of him. Something had struck him a stupefying blow between the brows, and he felt himself turn sick and faint. A hand was laid on his arm, and he was drawn into the cool darkness of the house. He heard the door close. Like a drunken man, he followed the bent figure into a room full of shadows and the scent of flowers.

“You're Captain Binns, sir? I'm sorry—I didn't recognize you—but I expected you in uniform. She was expecting you, sir. Won't you sit down?”

He shook his head. He looked about him, and everywhere there was the work of her delicate hands, of her white thought and upright soul. Her presence was a real, all-pervading truth to him. He felt her-hands on his shoulders—her eyes on his face.

“Would you like to see her, sir?”

He assented dumbly. The old woman opened the great folding doors. The room they entered seemed quite empty, save for what lay sleeping on the simple bed. There was no trace of death.

Edwin Binns stood beside the sleeper, looking down at her.

“She loved you very much, sir.” The voice sounded far off. “I was in her confidence, and I knew. She wanted to write to you, but the end came very suddenly. She gave me a message for you. I was to say that she was very proud of you and that you'd made her very happy. You see, sir, all her friends had died—every one she cared for. In these days she wanted some one of her own to be proud of—a son. She was very, very old, sir.”

He nodded, making a gesture that she seemed to understand. He heard the door close.

Still he stood motionless by the sleeper, recognizing his picture of her—the sweet, strong mouth, the serene forehead, the eyes, so noble even in their sheath of sleep. There were the white, fragile hands, crossed over a single lily——

What did the years matter?

Edwin Binns kissed her. He knelt down and buried his face in the flowers beside her.