Part 2 (1/2)

Gary, an American in British uniform, twitched a newspaper toward himself, slouched in his chair, and continued to read for a while. The paper was French and two weeks old; he jerked it about irritably.

Gray, resting his elbows on his knees, sat gazing vacantly out of the narrow window. For a smart officer he had grown slovenly.

”If there was any trout fis.h.i.+ng to be had,” he began; but Flint laughed scornfully.

”What are you laughing at? There must be trout in the valley down there where that bird is,” insisted Gray, reddening.

”Yes, and there are cows and chickens and houses and women. What of it?”

Gary, in his faded service uniform of a captain, scowled over his newspaper. ”It's bad enough to be here,” he said heavily; ”so don't let's talk about it. Quit disputing.”

Flint ignored the order.

”If there was anything sportin' to do----”

”Oh, shut up,” muttered Carfax. ”Do you expect sport on a hog-back?”

Gray picked up a tennis ball and began to play it against the whitewashed stone wall, using the palm of his hand. Flint joined him presently; Gary went over to the telephone, set the receiver to his ear and spoke to some officer in the distant valley on the French side, continuing a spiritless conversation while watching the handball play. After a while he rose, shambled out and down among the rocks to the spring where snow lay, trodden and filthy, and the big, black salamanders crawled half stupefied in the sun. All his loathing and fear of them kindled again as it always did at sight of them. ”Dirty beasts,” he muttered, stumping and stumbling among the stunted fir trees; ”some day they'll bite some of these d.a.m.n fools who say they can't bite. And that'll end 'em.”

Flint and Gray continued to play handball in a perfunctory way while Carfax looked on from the telephone without interest. Gary came back, his shoes and puttees all over wet snow.

”Unless,” he said in a monotonous voice, ”something happens within the next few days I'll begin to feel queer in my head; and if I feel it coming on, I'll blow my bally nut off. Or somebody's.” And he touched his service automatic in its holster and yawned.

After a dead silence:

”Buck up,” remarked Carfax; ”think how our men must feel in Belfort, never letting off their guns. Ross rifles, too--not a shot at a Boche since the d.a.m.n war began!”

”G.o.d!” said Flint, smiting the ball with the palm of his hand, ”to think of those Ross rifles rusting down there and to think of the pink-skinned pigs they could paunch so cleanly. Did you ever paunch a deer? What a mess of intestines all over the shop!”

Gary, still standing, began to kick the snow from his shoes. Gray said to him: ”For a dollar of your Yankee money I'd give you a shot at me with your automatic--you're that slack at practice.”

”If it goes on much longer like this I'll not have to pay for a shot at anybody,” returned Gary, with a short laugh.

Gray laughed too, disagreeably, stretching his facial muscles, but no sound issued.

”We're all going crazy together up here; that's my idea,” he said. ”I don't know which I can stand most comfortably, your voices or your silence. Both make me sick.”

”Some day a salamander will nip you; then you'll go loco,” observed Gary, balancing another tennis ball in his right hand. ”Give me a shot at you?”

he added. ”I feel as though I could throw it clean through you. You look soft as a pudding to me.”

Far, clear, from infinite depths, the elf-like hail of the cuckoo came floating up to the window.

To Flint, English born, the call meant more than it did to Canadian or Yankee.

”In Devon,” he said in an altered voice, ”they'll be calling just now.

There's a world of primroses in Devon.... And the thorn is as white as the d.a.m.ned snow is up here.”