Everyman's Land

								

"Mr. and Mrs. James W. Beckett will have the sympathy of all Europe as
well as their native land, in these tragic circumstances," the
journalist ended his story with a final flourish. "If such grief could
be assuaged, pride in the gallant death of their gallant son might be a
panacea."
"As if you could make pride into a balm for broken hearts!" I said to
myself in scorn of this flowery eloquence. For a few minutes I forgot my
own plight to pity these people whom I had never seen. The Paris Daily
Messenger slid off my lap on to the floor, and dropped with the back
page up. When I had glanced toward the bed, and seen that Brian still
slept, my eyes fell on the paper again. The top part of the last page is
always devoted to military snapshots, and a face smiled up at me from
it--a face I had seen once and never forgotten.
My heart gave a jump, Padre, because the one tiny, abbreviated
dream-romance of my life came from the original of that photograph.
Although the man I knew (if people can know each other in a day's
acquaintance) had been en civile, and this one was in aviator's
uniform, I was sure they were the same. And even before I'd snatched up
the paper to read what was printed under the picture, something--the
wonderful inner Something that's never wrong--told me I was looking at a
portrait of Jimmy Beckett.

CHAPTER II

I never mentioned my one-day romance to anybody. Only very silly,
sentimental girls would put such an episode into words, and flatter
themselves by calling it a romance. But now that you and Jimmy Beckett
have both given your lives for the great cause, and are in the same
mysterious Beyond while I'm still down here at Crucifix Corner, I can
tell you the story. If you and he meet, it may make it easier for him to
forgive me the thing I have done.
When Brian and I were having that great summer holiday of ours, the year
before the war--one day we were in a delicious village near a cathedral
town on the Belgian border. A piece of luck had fallen in our way, like
a ripe apple tumbling off a tree. A rich Parisian and his wife came
motoring along, and stopped out of sheer curiosity to look at a picture
Brian was painting, under a white umbrella near the roadside. I was not
with him. I think I must have been in the garden of our quaint old hotel
by the canal side, writing letters--probably one to you; but the couple
took such a fancy to Brian's "impression," that they offered to buy it.
The bargain was struck, there and then. Two days later arrived a
telegram from Paris asking for another picture to "match" the first at
the same price. I advised Brian to choose out two or three sketches for
the people to select from, and carry them to Paris himself, rather than
trust the post. He went; and it was on the one day of his absence that
my romance happened.
Ours was a friendly little hotel, with a darling landlady, who was
almost as much interested in Brian and me as if she'd been our