letters of his?”
Elaine shook her head.
“You lie,” said Diana. “Go and get them! I’ll give you three. One——”
Elaine rose nervously and went into the other room. Diana edged along the table, keeping her constantly in sight.
“Hurry!”
Elaine returned with a small package in her hand which Diana took and slipped into her blazer pocket.
“Thanks. You had ’em all carefully preserved I see. Sit down again and we’ll have a little talk.”
Elaine sat down. Charley drained off his whiskey and soda and leaned back stupidly in his chair.
“Now,” said Diana, “I’m going to tell you a little story. It’s about a girl who went to a war once and met a man who she thought was the finest and bravest man she had ever known. She fell in love with him and he with her and all the other men she had ever known became like pale shadows compared with this man that she loved. But one day he was shot down out of the air, and when he woke up into the world he’d changed. He didn’t know it himself but he’d forgotten things and become a different man. The girl felt sad about this—she saw that she wasn’t necessary to him anymore, so there was nothing to do but say good-bye.
“So she went away and every night for awhile she cried herself to sleep but he never came back to her and five years went by. Finally word came to her that this same injury that had come between them was ruining his life. He didn’t remember anything important anymore—how proud and fine he had once been, and what dreams he had once had. And then the girl knew that she had the right to try and save what was left of his life because she was the only one who knew all the things he’d forgotten. But it was too late. She couldn’t approach him anymore—she wasn’t coarse enough and gross enough to reach him now—he’d forgotten so much.
“So she took a revolver, very much like this one here, and she came after this man to the apartment of a poor, weak, harmless rat of a girl who had him in tow. She was going to either bring him to himself—or go back to the dust with him where nothing would matter anymore.”
She paused. Elaine shifted uneasily in her chair. Charley was leaning forward with his face in his hands.
“Charley!”
The word, sharp and distinct, startled him. He dropped his hands and looked up at her.
“Charley!” she repeated in a thin clear voice. “Do you remember Fontenay in the late fall?”
A bewildered look passed over his face.
“Listen, Charley. Pay attention. Listen to every word I say. Do you remember the poplar trees at twilight, and a long column of French infantry going through the town? You had on your blue uniform, Charley, with the little numbers on the tabs and you were going to the front in an hour. Try and remember, Charley!”
He passed his hand over his eyes and gave a funny little sigh. Elaine sat bolt upright in her chair and gazed from one to the other of them with wide eyes.
“Do you remember the poplar trees?” went on Diana. “The sun was going down and the leaves were silver and there was a bell ringing. Do you remember, Charley? Do you remember?”
Again silence. Charley gave a curious little groan and lifted his head.
“I can’t—understand,” he muttered hoarsely. “There’s something funny here.”
“Can’t you remember?” cried Diana. The tears were streaming from her eyes. “Oh God! Can’t you remember? The brown road and the poplar trees and the yellow sky.” She sprang suddenly to her feet. “Can’t you remember?” she cried wildly. “Think, think—there’s time. The bells are ringing—the bells are ringing, Charley! And there’s just one hour!”
Then he too was on his feet, reeling and swaying.
“Oh-h-h-h!” he cried.
“Charley,” sobbed Diana, “remember, remember, remember!”
“I see!” he said wildly. “I can see now—I remember, oh I remember!”
With a choking sob his whole body seemed to wilt under him and he pitched back senseless into his chair.
In a minute the two girls were beside him.
“He’s fainted!” Diana cried—“get some water quick.”
“You devil!” screamed Elaine, her face distorted. “Look what’s happened! What right have you to do this? What right? What right?”
“What right?” Diana turned to her with black, shining eyes. “Every right in the world. I’ve been married to Charley Abbot for five years.”
Charley and Diana were married again in Greenwich early in June. After the wedding her oldest friends stopped calling her Diamond Dick—it had been a most inappropriate name for some years, they said, and it was thought that the effect on her children might be unsettling, if not distinctly pernicious.
Yet perhaps if the occasion should arise Diamond Dick would come to life again from the colored cover and, with spurs shining and buckskin fringes fluttering in the breeze, ride into the lawless hills to protect her own. For under all her softness Diamond Dick was always hard as steel—so hard that the years knew it and stood still for her and the clouds rolled apart and a sick man, hearing those untiring hoof-beats in the night, rose up and shook off the dark burden of the war.
— ◆ —
The Third Casket.
(The Saturday Evening Post, 31 May 1924)
When you come into Cyrus Girard’s office suite on the thirty-second floor you think at first that there has been a mistake, that the elevator instead of bringing you upstairs has brought you uptown, and that you are walking into an apartment on Fifth Avenue where you have no business at all. What you take to be the sound of a stock ticker is only a businesslike canary swinging in a silver cage overhead, and while the languid debutante at the mahogany table gets ready to ask you your name you can feast your eyes on etchings, tapestries, carved panels and fresh flowers.
Cyrus Girard does not, however, run an interior-decorating establishment, though he has, on occasion, run almost everything else. The lounging aspect of his ante-room is merely an elaborate camouflage for the wild clamor of affairs that goes on ceaselessly within. It is merely the padded glove over the mailed fist, the smile on the face of the prizefighter.
No one was more intensely aware of this than the three young men who were waiting there one April morning to see Mr. Girard. Whenever the door marked Private trembled with the pressure of enormous affairs they started nervously in unconscious unison. All three of them were on the hopeful side of thirty, each of them had just got off the train, and they had never seen one another before. They had been waiting side by side on a Circassian leather lounge for the best part of an hour.
Once the young man with the pitch-black eyes and hair had pulled out a package of cigarettes and offered it hesitantly to the two others. But the two others had refused in such a politely alarmed way that the dark young man, after a quick look around, had returned the package unsampled to his pocket. Following this disrespectful incident a long silence had fallen, broken only by the clatter of the canary as it ticked off the bond market in bird land.
When the Louis XIII clock stood at noon the door marked Private swung open in a tense, embarrassed way, and a frantic secretary demanded that the three callers step inside. They stood up as one man.
“Do you mean—all together?” asked the tallest one in some embarrassment.
“All together.”
Falling unwillingly into a sort of lockstep and glancing neither to left nor right, they passed through a series of embattled rooms and marched into the private