Part 44 (1/2)

... That came careering headlong, as though malignity, bitter and wanton, had loosed a savage bolt.

Tybar killed! The cab was away and he was standing there. Tybar killed.

She had said they were hurrying to Scotland, to Tony's home. Tybar killed! He was getting in people's way. He went rather uncertainly to the railings bounding the pavement where he stood, and leaned against them and stared across into the dim cavern of the station yard. Tybar dead....[2]

[Footnote 2: At a much later date Nona told Sabre of Tony's death:

”It was in that advance of ours. Just before Vimy Ridge. At Arras.

Marko, he was shot down leading his men. He wouldn't let them take him away. Re was cheering them on. And then he was. .h.i.t again. He was terribly wounded. Oh, terribly. They got him down to the clearing station. They didn't think he could possibly live. But you know how wonderful he always was. Even in death that extraordinary spirit of his.... They got him to Boulogne. I was there and I heard quite by chance.”

”You saw him, Nona?”

She nodded. ”Just before he died. He couldn't speak. But he'd been speaking just before I came. He left a message with the nurse.”

She drew a long breath. ”Marko, the nurse gave me the message. She thought it was for me--and it wasn't.”

She wiped her eyes. ”He was watching us. I know he knew she was telling me, and his eyes--you know that mocking kind of look they used to have?

Poor Tony! It was there. He died like that.... Marko, you know I'm very glad he just had his old mocking way while he died. Now it's over I'm glad. I wouldn't have had him sorry and unhappy just when he was dying.

He was just utterly untouched by anything all his life, not to be judged as ordinary people are judged, and I know perfectly well he'd have wished to go out just his mocking, careless self to the last. He was utterly splendid. All that was between us, that was nothing once the war came. Always think kindly of him, Marko.”

Sabre said, ”I do. I've never been able but to admire him.” She said, ”Every one did Poor Tony. Brave Tony!”]

XI

On the following morning he crossed to France, there to take up again that strange ident.i.ty in whose occupancy his own self was held in abeyance, waiting his return. Seven months pa.s.sed before he returned to that waiting ident.i.ty and he resumed it then permanently,--done with the war. The tremendous fighting of 1917--his partic.i.p.ation in the war--his tenancy of the strange personality caught up in the enormous machinery of it all--ended for him in the great break through of the Hindenburg Line in November. On top of a recollection of sudden shock, then of whirling giddiness in which he was conscious of some enormous violence going on but could not feel it--like (as he afterwards thought) beginning to come to in the middle of a tooth extraction under gas--on the top of these and of extraordinary things and scenes and people he could not at all understand came some one saying:

”Well, it's good-by to the war for you, old man.”

He knew that he was aware--and somehow for some time had been aware--that he was in a cot in a s.h.i.+p. He said, ”I got knocked out, didn't I?”

... Some one was telling him some interminable story about some one being wounded in the shoulder and in the knee. He said, and his voice appeared to him to be all jumbled up and thick, ”Well, I don't care a d.a.m.n.”

... Some one laughed.

Years--or minutes--after this he was talking to a nurse. He said, ”What did some one say to me about it being good-by to the war for me?”

The nurse smiled. ”Well, poor thing, you've got it rather badly in the knee, you know.”

He puzzled over this. Presently he said, ”Where are we?”

The nurse bent across the cot and peered through the port; then beamed down on him:

”England!”

She said, ”Aren't you glad? _What's_ the matter?”

His face was contracted in intensity of thought, extraordinary thought: he felt the most extraordinary premonition of something disastrous awaiting him: there was in his mind, meaninglessly, menacingly, over and over again, ”Good luck have thee with thine honour ... and thy right hand shall show thee terrible things....”