Twenty-Three and a Half Hours' Leave/Chapter 2

ERGEANT GRAY was extremely contented. He sat back in his seat and alternately nibbled doughnuts and puffed at a cigarette. Before him, stretched as far as the limitations permitted, were two long and well-breeched legs, ending in tan shoes listed by the supply sergeant as “Shoes, field, pair, size 11 EE.”

He had surreptitiously taken out Mrs. Bud Palmer's photograph and decided that her face was shallow. And after a moment's hesitation he had decided not to waste any part of his precious leave in returning it. So he had torn it into bits and thrown it out of the window. Then he had taken a piece of paper and, writing on it “This space to let,” had placed it in the condiment can and put the can back in his saddlebags.

The reason of his content was that leave was now assured. At eleven o'clock that morning the general's field secretary had typed on a shaky field machine that stood on an equally unsteady tripod the order that at the port of embarkation twenty per cent of the men would be allowed each day some twenty-three and a half hours' leave.

Wild cheers in each car had followed the reading of the order. Wild cheers and wild plans. Sergeant Gray dreamed, doughnut in one hand and cigarette in the other. Twenty-three and a half hours! A lot could happen in twenty-three and a half hours. His dreams were general rather than concrete. Girls, theatres and food comprised them. No particular girl, no particular theatre, no particular food. He would call up some of the fellows from college, and they would have sisters. And when he had gone to the other side they would write to him.

He had no sentimental affiliations now. He had put all his eggs in one basket and the basket had been stolen.

“Lucky I'm not dependent on eggs for food!” he mused and, mistaking the hand in which he held the doughnut, bit vigorously into his cigarette.

Nevertheless his spirits grew lower as the day went on. It had occurred to him that all the fellows he had counted on for sisters would be in the Army, like himself. He cut off girls from his list, on that discovery; but food and theatres remained. He reflected rather defiantly that he could have a good time without girls; and then considered that a chap who lied to himself was in the class with a fellow who cheated at solitaire.

The day was hot. Kindly women at stations passed in sandwiches and coffee, and the troop, with the eternal appetite of twenty-odd, gorged themselves and cheered in overhanging pyramids from the windows. The corporals on guard between the cars slept on seats improvised of saddle-bags, and between naps rolled cigarettes. And the noncoms in their corner inveigled the porter to a game of crap, and took from him his week's accumulation of tips.

At the end of the game Sergeant Gray took out his money and counted it.

“Looks like you'd be able to give the Old Man a right good breakfast,” observed the stable sergeant.

“Oh, it's to be his breakfast,” said Sergeant Gray recklessly.

“It is, is it?” The stable sergeant regarded him with admiration. “Want to bet on it?”

“Just as you like,” was the cool answer.

“Look here,” said the stable sergeant, aware of an audience. “I'll lay you five to one you don't breakfast with him at all; ten to one you don't do it on his invitation, and”—he hesitated for effect—“twenty to one you don't do it within a week.”

“Good!” said Sergeant Gray, and laid some bills on his knee. “I'd wager I could pull the Crown Prince's nose at those odds. Then if I do breakfast with him within a week on his invitation you'll owe me a hundred and seventy-five dollars.”

“I wish my money was as safe in the bank.” But the stable sergeant was vaguely uncomfortable. Those college chaps had a way of putting things over. He went out on the platform and stared uneasily at the flying scenery.

Sergeant Gray folded his new uniform under the mattress of his berth that night. It was bad for the collar, but he did it lest worse befall it. He suspected the troop of jealous designs on it. But he could not fold himself away so easily, and lay diagonally, with two Number Eleven Double E feet in the aisle. At four in the morning he wakened, the cause being a dream that he had for some hours been walking in a puddle and needed to change his shoes.

Still only half awake, he looked at his feet, to perceive that some wag had neatly blackened them with shoe polish from the porter's closet. He immediately reached under his pillow for his whistle and blew a shrill blast on it, followed by a stentorian roar.

“Roll out, you dirty horsemen! R-r-roll out!” he yelled.

Still half asleep, they roused at the familiar sounds. Grunting and protesting they sat up. From the berth over him a corporal swung down two long bare legs and sat on the edge, yawning. Then somebody looked at a watch. There would have been a small riot, but the men were too sleepy and too relieved. They tumbled back, and Sergeant Gray lay on his pillow and grinned vindictively.

He did not go to sleep at once. He lay there and thought of his wager, and cursed himself for a fool. Then he dismissed that and thought of his twenty-three and a half hours' leave. If only there were a girl—a nice girl. He did not want the sort of girl a fellow picked up in the streets. He wanted a real girl, the sort a fellow could write to later on.

Little quickenings of romance stirred in his heart. A pretty girl, preferably small. He liked them little, with pointed chins. They had a way, the little girls with pointed chins, of looking up at a fellow”

He wakened at seven. The troop were still sleeping, but from the baggage car ahead there floated back an odor of frying bacon, and on the platform of a station outside—for the train had stopped—the general was taking an airing.

Sergeant Gray blew his whistle. “R-r-roll out!” he yelled. “R-r-roll out, you blooming sons of guns!”

And, to emphasize his authority, he lifted a strong and muscular pair of legs and raised the upper berth, in which the corporal still slept. Smothered sounds from above convincing him that his efforts had been successful he dropped the upper berth with a jerk.

“R-r-roll out, up there!” he yelled; and whistle in hand he lay back to the succulent enjoyment of an orange.

Across from him the stable sergeant had turned on his back for another nap. Through the curtains, opened against the heat, Gray could see that young gentleman's broad chest rising and falling slowly. The temptation and destiny were too strong for him. He bounced an orange on it, only to see it rebound through the window and to hear a deafening roar. The stable sergeant sat up, a hand on his chest and fire in his eyes. He blinked into the distorted face of the general, outside the window. The general was holding a hand to his left ear.

“Who threw that orange?' demanded the general.

“Wh-what orange, sir?”

“Don't lie to me. It came out of this window.”

“I was asleep, sir. Something struck me on the chest. I didn't see it, sir!”

Behind his curtains Sergeant Gray had been struggling into his trousers. He emerged now, slightly pale but determined.

“I threw it, sir,” he explained. “I had no idea—it bounced, sir.”

The general surveyed him grimly.

“It's a curious thing, sergeant,” he said, “that when there is any deviltry going on in the Headquarters Troop I find you at the bottom of it. Report to me in my car at eight o'clock.”

Then he stalked away.

Down the car a sonorous bass spoke from behind a curtain: “The commanding general presents his compliments to Sergeant Gray, and will Sergeant Gray breakfast with him in his private car at eight o'clock?”

Sergeant Gray dressed hastily. There was the bitterness of despair in his heart, for he knew what was coming. He would have no twenty-three and a half hours' leave, no theatres, no decent food, no girl. And over his head still that idiotic bet.

“Oh, hell!” he muttered, and started back.

The general was still in a very bad temper, and his left ear was swollen and purple. He lost no time in the attack—he believed in striking swiftly and hard—and he read off, from an excellent memory, the tale of Sergeant Gray's various sins of commission. But he did not go so far as he meant to go, at that. In the first place, Gray was an excellent noncom, and in the second place there was something in the boy's upstanding figure and clear if worried eyes that, coupled with another of the excellent cigars, inclined him to leniency.

“But remember this, Gray,” he finished severely, “I don't usually meddle with these things. But I've got my eye on you. One more infraction of discipline, and you'll lose your stripes.”

“Yes, sir,' said Sergeant Gray.

He was intolerably virtuous all that day.

Late that afternoon they detrained two miles from the new camp, and marched along, singing lustily songs that sound better than they look in print, and joyously stretching legs too long confined. it mattered nothing to them that the temporary camp was untidy and badly drained; that the general passing in a limousine was reading an order that meant an emergency abroad, into which they were to be thrown at once; that a certain percentage of them would never come back; and that a certain other percentage would return, never again to tramp the open road or to see the blue sky overhead.

But a girl in a little car trailing in the dust behind the staff cars thought of those things, and almost ran over the company goat, Eloise, because of tears.

“Darned little idiot!” murmured Sergeant Gray, and gave his last doughnut to Eloise.

There was no thrill, no increase over the regular seventy-six beats a minute of his heart to tell him that love had just passed by in a pink hat.

Until eighty-thirty that night Sergeant Gray was obnoxiously virtuous. He had met an English noncom in the camp, and was studiously endeavouring to copy that gentleman's carriage and dignity. And the attraction of the new surroundings had turned the attention of the troop from him and his wager to other things. A discovery, too, of certain conditions in the barracks distracted them.

“A week here,” growled the second mess sergeant, “and we'll all have to be dipped.”

“Might as well get used to it, old son,” said Sergeant Gray, and hummed a little ditty to the effect that “They are wild, simply wild, over me.”

But with the falling of darkness the high spirits of the crowd broke loose. That night there was a battle royal in the barracks. The lower squad room, which housed among others the N. C. O's, decided to raid the two upper squad rooms. Word of this having been passed up, the upper squad rooms were prepared. At the top of the stairs were stationed the fire buckets, filled to the top, and a pile of coal stolen from the kitchen and secretly conveyed to the upper floor by means of baskets, a window and a rope.

Twice the lower squad reached the top of the staircase, amid wild yells and much splashing of water. The hall and stairs were running small rivers. Coals, recklessly flung down, were salvaged like hand grenades by the attacking force and thrown back again.

The noise penetrated to august quarters, and the sentry at the door, placed there for just such an emergency, having been infected with the mad desire to fight, and being at that moment in the act of climbing the coal rope to attack the enemy from the rear, an officer with a flash was at the door before he was seen.

Followed instantaneous quiet with the only sound the dripping of water down the stairs. Followed the silent retreat of the warriors to beds, into which they crept fully dressed. The officer moved through the lower squad room. It was extremely quiet save for an occasional deep-throated snore. The officer smiled grimly and went away.

And in the darkness Sergeant Gray sat up and felt of his right eye.

In the early dawn, hearing the cook stirring, he went across to the mess hall, a strange figure in his undergarments, with one eye closed and a bruise on his forehead as big as an egg. The cook eyed him angrily, and addressed him without regard to his dignity as a sergeant.

“Some o' you fellows get busy and bring back that coal you took last night,” he said. “I got something else to do.”

“Look here, Watt,” said Sergeant Gray appealingly, “I'll get the coal for you all right. But give me a piece of raw beefsteak, won't you? Look at this eye.”

“Pleased to see it,” said the cook with a vindictive glare.

“Forget it, Watt. I'll get your coal. See here, I've got leave to-morrow, and I want to go to the city.”

“Well, you can go, for all of me.”

“I want,” said Sergeant Gray plaintively, “to get my picture taken. I want to send it to my mother.”

Suddenly the cook laughed. He leaned over the big serving counter and laughed until he was weak.

“Picture!” he said. “My word! She'll think the Germans have had you! Say, give me one, will you?”

He went to the refrigerator, however, and brought out a piece of raw beef.

It should have warned Sergeant Gray, lying sulkily on his cot through that bright spring day, the beef over his eye and attracting a multitude of flies, that no one else had suffered visible injury. The boys came and went blithely, each intent on his own affairs. United action had cleaned up the hallway and the stairs. But Sergeant Gray, picked out as Fate's victim, lay and dozed and struck at flies and—waited.

By night the swelling had gone, but a deep bluish shadow encircled the right eye. Frequent consultation of his shaving mirror told him that he would have the mark for days, but at least he could see. That was something. He got up after dusk and dressed in the new uniform. Then he wandered about the camp.

He felt very lonely. Most of his intimates were on leave. Round the camp the men lounged negligently. Some one with a mandolin was strumming it, and from the theatre, where a movie show was going on, came the rattle of clapping hands. Sergeant Gray hesitated at the door, then he moved on.

What he wanted was some one to talk to, a girl preferably. He wandered past division headquarters, where the chief of staff stood inside a window rolling a cigarette; past the bull pen, surrounded by its fifteen feet of barbed wire and its military police.

At the edge of the camp he halted. From there one could see a brilliance reflected in the sky—the lights of the port of embarkation, ten miles away.

Sergeant Gray sighed and sat down on the road near an automobile. And somebody spoke to him.

“Can I take you anywhere?” asked the voice.

It was young and feminine. Something that had been aching in Sergeant Gray's deep chest suddenly stopped aching and leaped.

“Thanks,” he said. “I'm not going anywhere in particular.”

“I just thought”—explained the voice—“I'm waiting for the—for a relative and I might as well be taking people to the street-car line. The taxis have stopped.”

A car leaving the camp threw its lights on her. She was small and young and had a pointed chin. Sergeant Gray got up.

“It's awfully good of you,” he said. “If it isn't too much trouble I'll go to the end of the line.”

“Get in,” she said briefly.

Sergeant Gray sat back in the little car and drew a long breath.

“It's rather small for you, isn't it?” asked the girl, throwing in the clutch. “My brother has to fold up too. He's in France,” she added. “That's why I like to do things for the soldiers here. It's like doing something for him.”

Sergeant Gray pondered this. He considered it rather an unusual thing for a girl to have thought of. He considered that she was as nice as she was pretty. He also considered that she drove well. Sergeant Gray, who in his leisure hours practiced running a motorcycle with the side car in the air, paid her tribute of approval.

“We'll be over soon,” he said with a touch of pride.

“You'd better not tell anybody that.”

“Why? I rather think our being here tells the story.”

“Well, a lot of people would like to know just when you're going. They hang round the men and offer them rides in cars, and the men get to talking, and pretty soon they've told all they know.”

“They'd better not try it on me.”

“You almost told me a moment ago.”

Sergeant Gray sat quiet and a trifle hurt.

“I am only warning you,” said the girl. “There are spies simply everywhere. I can't do much, and that's my way of doing something. That and being a sort of taxi,” she added.

The were in a town now, and by the lamps he saw just how pretty she was.

“Thanks awfully for warning me,” he said rather humbly. “A fellow gets to think that all this spy talk is—just talk.”

“Well, it isn't,” said the girl briefly but with the air of one who knew.

The sergeant eyed her askance.

“That sounds as though you knew something.”

“Perhaps I do. Though of course one doesn't really know these things. One suspects.”

“Naturally one does.”

She glanced at him, but his face was grave.

“What I would like to know,” he proceeded, “is what one does when one suspects.”

“I am afraid you are trying to be funny,” she observed coldly, and brought the car to a standstill. “Here's your car line.”

He hesitated. Then he made a wild resolve.

“I see it,” he said agreeably. “Thanks awfully for bringing me. We can go back now.”

She stared at him.

“You are not going anywhere?”

“Why, no,” he said, trying not to look conscious. “I said that I'd like to go to the end of the car line.”

“You're there.”

“I only wanted to look at it.”

“Very well. Get out and look at it. I don't think you'll find it unusual in any way.”

“Look here,” he said humbly. “I'm awfully sorry. I was just hungry to talk to some one, and when you offered”

“I have done exactly as I offered. You will please get out!”

He got out slowly. He was overcome with wretchedness and guilt, but her pointed chin was held high and her face was obstinate.

“Thank you very much,” said Sergeant Gray, and turning drearily commenced his lonely walk back to camp.

He could hear her behind him backing and turning in the narrow street. He plodded on, cursing himself. If he had had any sense and had got out and let her think he was going somewhere

The lights of the car were close behind him now. When they were abreast he heard the grinding of the brakes as it stopped.

“I don't want to be disagreeable,” said the girl, beside him. “I suppose you did want some one to talk to. I'll take you back if you like.”

“I'd better not bother you any more.”

Suddenly she laughed. In the light from a street lamp she had caught her first real glimpse of his face.

“Wherever did you get that eye?' she demanded.

“Fighting,” he said shortly. “We had a roughhouse at the barracks last night.”

“I should think you were going to have enough trouble soon without getting beaten up like that,” she said with a touch of severity. “Well, are you going to get in?”

He got in. She had been rather reserved coming down, but now she was more talkative. His little remark about being hungry for some one to talk to had struck home. Her brother had said something like that once. They must get hungry for girls, nice girls.

So now she chattered and she drew from the tall boy beside her something about himself. It was not particularly hard to do. Sergeant Gray opened up like a flower in the sun. He explained, for instance, that he was to have a commission when he was twenty-one.

“Unless,” he admitted, “I'm in too bad with the Old Man.”

“The Old Man?”

“The general,” explained Sergeant Gray, unaware that the young lady was sitting very straight. “He's hell—he's strong for discipline, and all that. And—well, every now and then I slip up on something, and he gets me. It's always me he gets,” he finished plaintively and ungrammatically.

“But you shouldn't do things that are wrong.”

Sergeant Gray pondered this amazing statement.

“Perhaps you're right,” he acknowledged. “I hadn't thought of that.”

“You might try being terribly well behaved for—well, for twenty-four hours.”

“Do you want me to?”

“It's entirely a matter of your own good,” she said rather coldly.

“I'll do it!” said Sergeant Gray rashly. “Not a misstep for twenty-four hours. How's that?”

“It sounds well.”

“The truth is,” confided Sergeant Gray, “I've got to be good. He's watching. He told me so.”

“And if you're not”

“Shot against a brick wall probably.” He grinned cheerfully. “Think of that hanging over a fellow, and twenty-three and a half hours' leave to-morrow.”

“I hope,” she said in the motherly tone she assumed now and then, “that you are going to be awfully careful to-morrow.”

“Did you ever see a cat crossing a wet gutter? Well, that's me to-morrow. This is no time to take any chances.”

At which probably those particular gods that had Sergeant Gray in their keeping laughed behind their hands.

The girl stopped the car at the camp, and the plaything of destiny descended.

“Thank you, awfully,” observed the said plaything with a considerable amount of warmth in his voice. “I—perhaps I shall not see you again.”

“I was just thinking—what time does your leave commence to-morrow?”

“At ten-thirty”—hopefully.

“I might pick you up then and take you to the trolley.”

“Honestly, would you?” he asked delightedly. “You know, I—really, I can't tell you how grateful I would be.”

“I love to make the taxi men wriggle,” was her rather unsatisfactory reply. 'I'll be here, then. Good night.”

Sergeant Gray saluted and went away. To all appearances he was a rather overgrown young man trudging through the mud of a not too-tidy camp to a barracks that needed carbolising. Actually he was a sublimated being favoured of heaven and floating in a rosy cloud of dreams.

“Halt!” said a guard, and threw his rifle to port arms. “Who's there?”

“Sergeant of the Headquarters Troop,” said the superman.

“Where's your pass?”

The superman presented it, and the guard inspected it closely—the attitude of the M. P. being that all men are Germans unless proved otherwise.

“Thoroughly satisfactory?” inquired the superman.

The M. P. grunted.

The sergeant approached him and lowered his voice confidentially.

“Tell you something,” he volunteered: “I'm not the same chap who went out on that pass.”

“What d'you mean you're not?”

“It's like this, old son. But first of all let me ask you something.” He glanced about cautiously. “Man to man, old son—do you believe in love at first sight?”

“Last fellow who tried being funny round here,” said the guard grimly, “had a chance to laugh himself to death in the bull pen.”

“No heart!” sighed the sergeant, moving on, still on air. “No soul! No imagination! Good night, my sad and lonely friend. Good night!”

He moved on, singing in a very deep bass:

The chief of staff, who had also discovered that his quarters needed fumigation, raised from an uneasy pillow and groaned disgustedly.

“Stop that noise out there!” he bawled through the window beside him.

The superman recognised neither the voice nor the new quarters of the staff.

“Minion,” he said, halting and addressing the window, “hast never loved?”

Then he moved on, still in a roseate cloud the exact shade of a certain pink hat.

His voice died away, swallowed up in distance and the night.

When he went into the lower squad room a sort of chant greeted him from the beds: “Where, oh where's the sergeant been?”

And the reply shouted lustily: “Out getting measured for a shave.”

He undressed quietly, and salvaging the piece of beefsteak from under his pillow got into bed and placed it carefully over his eye.