"I hate you," she said slowly. "I hate you!"
She turned and went slowly up the stairs. Graham, knocking at her door
a few minutes later, heard the sound of hysterical sobbing, within, but
received no reply.
"Good-by, mother," he called. "Good-by. Don't worry. I'll be all right."
When he saw she did not mean to open the door or to reply, he went
rather heavily down the stairs.
"I wish she wouldn't," he said. "It makes me darned unhappy."
But Clayton surmised a relief behind his regret, and in the train the
boy's eyes were happier than they had been for months.
"I don't know how I'll come out, dad," he said. "But if I don't get
through it won't be because I didn't try."
And he did try. The enormous interest of the thing gripped him from
the start; There was romance in it, too. He wore his first uniform,
too small for him as it was, with immense pride. He rolled out in the
morning at reveille, with the feeling that he had just gone to bed, ate
hugely at breakfast, learned to make his own cot-bed, and lined up on a
vast dusty parade ground for endless evolutions in a boiling sun.
It was rather amusing to find himself being ordered about, in a
stentorian voice, by Jackson. And when, in off moments, that capable
ex-chauffeur condescended to a few moments of talk and relaxation, the
boy was highly gratified.
"Do you think I've got anything in me?" he would inquire anxiously.
And Jackson always said heartily, "Sure you have."
There were times when Graham doubted himself, however. There was one
dreadful hour when Graham, in the late afternoon, and under the eyes
of his commanding officer and a group of ladies, conducting the highly
formal and complicated ceremony of changing the guard, tied a lot of
grinning men up in a knot which required the captain of the company and
two sergeants to untangle.
"I'm no earthly good," he confided to Jackson that night, sitting on the
steps of his barracks. "I know it like a-b-c, and then I get up and try
it and all at once I'm just a plain damned fool."
"Don't give up like that, son," Jackson said. "I've seen 'em march a
platoon right into the C.O.'s porch before now. And once I just saved a
baby-buggy and a pair of twins."
Clayton wrote him daily, and now and then there came a letter from
Natalie, cheerful on the surface, but its cheerfulness obviously forced.
And once, to his great surprise, Marion Hayden wrote him.