The Day of the Beast

“Why, didn't I write you? Of course I did.”

“Well, if you did I never got the letter. And if you were on the level you'd admit you never wrote.”

“How'd you find out then?” she inquired curiously.

“I never knew for sure until your mother verified it.”

“Are you curious to know why I did break it off?”

“Not in the least.”

This reply shot the fire into her face, yet she still persisted in the expression of her sentimental motive. She began to finger the medal on his breast.

“So, Mr. Soldier Hero, you didn't care?”

“No—not after I had been here ten minutes,” he replied, bluntly.

She whirled from him, swiftly, her body instinct with passion, her expression one of surprise and fury.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing I care to explain, except I discovered my love for you was dead—perhaps had been dead for a long time.”

“But you never discovered it until yousaw me—here—with Swann—dancing, drinking, smoking?”

“No. To be honest, the shock of that enlightened me.”

“Daren Lane, I'm just whatyou men have made me,” she burst out, passionately.

“You are mistaken. I beg to be excluded from any complicity in the—in whatever you've been made,” he said, bitterly. “I have been true to you in deed and in thought all this time.”

“You must be a queer soldier!” she exclaimed, incredulously.

“I figure there were a couple of million soldiers like me, queer or not,” he retorted.

She gazed at him with something akin to hate in her eyes. Then putting her hands to her full hips she began that swaying, dancing walk to and fro before the window. She was deeply hurt. Lane had meant to get under her skin with a few just words of scorn, and he had imagined his insinuation as to the change in her had hurt her feelings. Suddenly he divined it was not that at all—he had only wounded her vanity.

“Helen, let's not talk of the past,” he said. “It's over. Even if you had been true to me, and I loved you still—I would have been compelled to break our engagement.”

“You would! And why?”

“I am a physical wreck—and a mental one, too, I fear.... Helen, I've come home to die.”

“Daren!” she cried, poignantly.

Then he told her in brief, brutal words of the wounds and ravages war had dealt him, and what Doctor Bronson's verdict had been. Lane felt shame in being so little as to want to shock and hurt her, if that were possible.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” she burst out. “Your mother—your sister.... Oh, that damned horrible war!What has it not done to us?... Daren, you looked white and weak, but I never thought you were—going to die.... How dreadful!”

Something of her girlishness returned to her in this moment of sincerity. The past was not wholly dead. Memories lingered. She looked at Lane, wide-eyed, in distress, caught between strange long-forgotten emotions.

“Helen, it's not dreadful to have to die,” replied Lane. “Thatis not the dreadful part in coming home.”

“Whatis dreadful, then?” she asked, very low.

Lane felt a great heave of his breast—the irrepressible reaction of a profound and terrible emotion, always held in abeyance until now. And a fierce pang, that was physical as well as emotional, tore through him. His throat constricted and ached to a familiar sensation—the welling up of blood from his lungs. The handkerchief he put to his lips came away stained red. Helen saw it, and with dilated eyes, moved instinctively as if to touch him, hold him in her pity.

“Never mind, Helen,” he said, huskily. “That's nothing.... Well, I was about to tell you what is so dreadful—for me.... It's to reach home grateful to God I was spared to get home—resigned to the ruin of my life—content to die for whom I fought—my mother, my sister,you , and all our women (for I fought for nothing else)—and find my mother aged and bewildered and sad, my sister a painted little hussy— andyou —a strange creature I despise.... And all, everybody, everything changed— changed in some horrible way which proves my sacrifice in vain.... It is not death that is dreadful, but the uselessness, the hopelessness of the ideal I cherished.”

Helen fell on the couch, and burying her face in the pillows she began to sob. Lane looked down at her, at her glistening auburn hair, and slender, white, ringed hand clutching the cushions, at her lissom shaking form, at the shapely legs in the rolled-down silk stockings—and he felt a melancholy happiness in the proof that he had reached her shallow heart, and in the fact that this was the moment of loss.

“Good-bye—Helen,” he said.

“Daren—don't—go,” she begged.

But he had to go, for other reasons beside the one that this was the end of all intimate relation between him and Helen. He had overtaxed his strength, and the burning pang in his breast was one he must heed. On the hall stairway a dizzy spell came over him. He held on to the banister until the weakness passed. Fortunately there was