Part 43 (2/2)

I said I didn't understand; that I couldn't see what difference it made _how_ he went, so long as he did go in the end.

”It made _all_ the difference,” said Mr. Ewing. ”You see, he didn't rush off, at the first news of the fighting, the way you'd think a man would.

Why, we used to read the papers and talk over the war news together, and every day I'd expect to hear him say something about going. He knew all the places, and the way everything was over there, but he never seemed to care to be there himself. He used to come round to my house just before supper-time in the evenings and we'd sit on the porch and talk, or maybe I'd go round to his porch. I asked him one day if he didn't want to go, and all he said was, 'Why should I?' And I said I didn't know, it seemed to me that he would. And he said he was comfortable for the first time in his life; he never had liked b.u.mping around in all sorts of places; hated it as a matter of fact. I asked him why, if that was the case, he'd kept it up for so long, all those years; and he laughed, and said _he_ didn't know; he never _had_ been able to figure that out.”

Mr. Ewing fell silent here, tapping his right foot on the carpet a little impatiently and looking speculatively, yet without seeing, at me.

I had the impression that he felt he had utterly failed, up to now, in making some subtle point in his story clear, and was considering how best he might make me see. I was sure of it when, after a longish pause, he continued, for he seemed to have decided upon the abandonment of subtleties altogether, and to give me, for my own interpretation, the facts as they occurred.

Things had gone on without any change all that winter and the next summer. In August Corey went to some sort of convention of medical men in Philadelphia. He was to have been gone something over two weeks. At the end of that time Mrs. Corey had received a letter saying that some experiments in which he was specially interested had developed rather unexpectedly, and Corey, together with several others, had been detailed to stay on and work them out to their conclusion. He couldn't say just how many days it would take; he would let her know.

At the end of another two weeks Corey was still away. The first phase of the experiments had unhappily come to grief, and they had had to begin from the first again. It was annoying, but since they had gone into it, there was nothing else to be done. He would leave for home on the moment of the work's completion. Meantime there would be little opportunity for letter-writing. She was not to worry.

As the days went on Mrs. Corey began to regret not having gone along in the beginning, as he had wanted her to do. Mr. Ewing stopped in now and then to inquire. Her reticence made him wonder if she might not be hearing. It was plain that she _did_ worry, but, as Mr. Ewing said, she was not the talkative kind.

And then, one morning, just two months from the day he had left, Corey arrived unexpectedly by the ten-fifty train. Mr. Ewing, pa.s.sing the house on his way home that evening, had been surprised to see Corey, in his s.h.i.+rt-sleeves, tr.i.m.m.i.n.g shrubs in the garden. And he had stopped to welcome him back, and they had talked about the war in quite the old way, so that from that evening on it was exactly the same as it had been before Corey had gone to his convention in Philadelphia.

It appears that all this time a very natural intimacy was growing up between these two, gentle old Mr. Ewing and Corey. And I can imagine that Corey, who became, as it were, the instantaneous friend of every one, had made in his life very few actual contacts, few, if any, real and intimate friends.h.i.+ps. And perhaps that was why this friends.h.i.+p, based as it was on such small outward manifestations as talking over the news in the daily papers together, had prospered. Then, too, there was the relations.h.i.+p, distant enough to be free of demands.

Corey had returned from the Philadelphia trip the last week in October.

It was on a Sunday afternoon near the middle of December that Mr. Ewing, sitting reading his weekly ill.u.s.trated paper, looked up to see through the window Corey coming quickly along the walk. Mr. Ewing was struck by something peculiar in his friend's appearance, something hurried in the set of his hat and overcoat, yet as if he himself were entirely unconscious of haste.

He turned in at the gate, and Mr. Ewing got up and opened the door.

Corey came through it, Mr. Ewing said, as if escaping from something outside, something of which he was physically afraid. He almost pushed past Mr. Ewing and into the room, and with scarcely a glance to make sure they were alone, he spoke, and his voice was strained like a note on a too taut violin string:

”She's found it! _This_-where I'd had it hid!”

He held extended in his open hand, as if there were no longer any reason for concealing it from any one, what appeared to Mr. Ewing's bewildered eyes to be a bit of ribbon, striped green and red, and a bit of bronze metal attached.

”What is it?” he asked, stupefied by the completeness of the change that had come upon the man before him.

”It's the _Croix_!” Corey's voice was impatient, ”The _Croix de Guerre_!”

Mr. Ewing stared at the bright-colored thing, trying to comprehend.

Corey still held it outstretched in his hand, and the bronze Maltese cross with its crossed swords slipped through his fingers and hung down.

Corey's voice was going on. Mr. Ewing had missed something.

”... So now she knows,” was the end of what he heard-and in that instant his eye caught the words engraved on the cross, _Republique Francaise_, and the full meaning of its being there in Corey's hand burst suddenly upon him.

The new French decoration! The _Croix de Guerre_!

”You've _been_ there?” he managed to say. ”You've been over there?”

”How else would I get it?” said Corey, with a kind of abandon, as if he were confessing now to some fullness of shame. ”You see, she's right. I couldn't resist.”

Mr. Ewing was lost. ”Resist what?”

”This!” Corey closed his fingers now on the _Croix_. ”A new decoration!”

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