Strange Yesterday Read Free

has been so long—seven years. But that does not matter!”
    â€œWhat does matter?”
    â€œThat you are here—alive. God help me, I am so happy.”
    But with his face suddenly sober, he glanced down at the empty sleeve. “You see—my arm.”
    She went close to him, and she laid her hand against his cheek. “How you must have suffered,” she whispered.
    â€œA part of me is gone. It will be different.”
    â€œYou child—you strange old man of a child.”
    â€œA part of me is gone,” he repeated; and then, finding her at his very breast, he crushed her to him again, forgetting everything in the fragrance of her hair.
    And old John Preswick, the years fallen from him, stood and watched it. He was in pearl-gray, old John Preswick, with a white flower in his buttonhole, with a clump of worked silk at his chin, with lace dangling from the cuffs of his coat covering his hands. He leaned upon the frog-headed stick with the gold bands, and he twirled the ends of his long white mustache.

3
    Now, they were married in the Methodist meeting house in John Street, which John Preswick had given liberally to for the building. And Inez looked towards the strange, dark, one-armed man, wondering only now that she was to take him for her husband.
    She was all in white lace that was over a hundred years old, and he in his blue and ivory uniform, and she stood by him proudly, her chin in the air. Very proudly, she stood by him, her chin tilted like the bowsprit of a ship without cargo. And as the words made her his wife, she stood silent, unmoving. Then he kissed her, crumpling the old lace, drinking in her scent. She took his arm, and they went out of the church, old John Preswick following after, smiling and strutting like a turkey cock, waving Sam from him, disdaining even to use his frog-headed stick with the bands of gold.
    After that, to old John Preswick, it seemed that a flame came to light up the house; and when he sat at his great mahogany desk in his office, the place was no longer dead and still, but alive—with life. For the first time in twenty-nine years a woman ruled the house in Cherry Street.
    She was such a woman as old John Preswick would have taken upon himself to love, had it ever been his to love again. Old John’s heart longed after women, and he throbbed to see the curve of her breast and the long fine sweep of her thigh. She was as young as his son was old, and the fullness of life in her contrasted strangely with the dull lethargy of his son. He wondered, sometimes, that the man who was back could not share his happiness. He knew it was his son, and yet it was not his son. It was a dark, moody creature with a single arm, who walked slowly, shoulders curved, head bent until the chin touched the breast. His skin had a yellow tinge which never disappeared, and the lean hollowness of his face gave his head the look of a skin-covered lifeless skull. Very little did he speak—hardly at all unless addressed. They took to calling him Captain. Sam called him Captain; even his father began to use the name; only Inez called him Johnny.
    Inez had a way with him. Inez could smile, and only Inez could make him smile, and she rarely. At times Inez could open him up, so that he told her things; yet much there was he never spoke of. He would lay his head upon her breast—fine breast, firm and warm—and he would talk to her. He would attempt to convey what was upon his brow. He would say:
    â€œThey come back. I counted of those I knew, and there were exactly eighty men that I killed. Realize that, eighty men in five years, and of the eighty, I ran through twelve with my sword. That is why they took my arm. The others did not hate me. I killed them, but when a soldier dies by a bullet, he is only resentful, not bitter. He expects that. Only a sword is different. It is cold steel, and when it slides into you, it carries bits of flesh along. And it