Page 86 - tender-is-the-night

This was the last love battle.’
‘You want to hand over this battle to D. H. Lawrence,’
said Abe.
‘All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here
with a great gust of high explosive love,’ Dick mourned per-
sistently. ‘Isn’t that true, Rosemary?’
‘I don’t know,’ she answered with a grave face. ‘You know
everything.’
They dropped behind the others. Suddenly a shower of
earth gobs and pebbles came down on them and Abe yelled
from the next traverse:
‘The war spirit’s getting into me again. I have a hundred
years of Ohio love behind me and I’m going to bomb out this
trench.’ His head popped up over the embankment. ‘You’re
dead—don’t you know the rules? That was a grenade.’
Rosemary laughed and Dick picked up a retaliatory
handful of stones and then put them down.
‘I couldn’t kid here,’ he said rather apologetically. ‘The
silver cord is cut and the golden bowl is broken and all that,
but an old romantic like me can’t do anything about it.’
‘I’m romantic too.’
They came out of the neat restored trench, and faced a
memorial to the Newfoundland dead. Reading the inscrip-
tion Rosemary burst into sudden tears. Like most women
she liked to be told how she should feel, and she liked Dick’s
telling her which things were ludicrous and which things
were sad. But most of all she wanted him to know how she
loved him, now that the fact was upsetting everything,
now that she was walking over the battlefield in a thrilling

86 Tender is the Night