on. “I said: This is the earth of Shakespeare, and Milton, and John Keats and, by God, what’s more, it’s mine as well! God bless her! God bless her!”
Tears flowed quietly from Margaret Leonard’s eyes. Her face was wet. She could not speak. They were all deeply moved.
“She won’t go,” said John Dorsey Leonard. “We’ll have a word to say to that! She won’t go! You wait!”
In Eugene’s fantasy there burned the fixed vision of the great hands clasped across the sea, the flowering of green fields, and the developing convolutions of a faery London—mighty, elfin, old, a romantic labyrinth of ancient crowded ways, tall, leaning houses, Lucullan food and drink, and the mad imperial eyes of genius burning among the swarm of quaint originality.
As the war developed, and the literature of war-enchantment began to appear, Margaret Leonard gave him book after book to read. They were the books of the young men—the young men who fought to blot out the evil of the world with their blood. In her trembling voice she read to him Rupert Brooke’s sonnet—“If I should die, think only this of me”—and she put a copy of Donald Hankey’s A Student in Arms into his hand, saying:
“Read this, boy. It will stir you as you’ve never been stirred before. Those boys have seen the vision!”
He read it. He read many others. He saw the vision. He became a member of this legion of chivalry—young Galahad-Eugene—a spearhead of righteousness. He had gone a-Grailing. He composed dozens of personal memoirs, into which quietly, humorously, with fine-tempered English restraint, he poured the full measure of his pure crusading heart. Sometimes, he came through to the piping times of peace minus an arm, a leg, or an eye, diminished but ennobled; sometimes his last radiant words were penned on the eve of the attack that took his life. With glistening eyes, he read his own epilogue, enjoyed his post-mortem glory, as his last words were recorded and explained by his editor. Then, witness of his own martyrdom, he dropped two smoking tears upon his young slain body. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
Ben loped along, scowling, by Wood’s pharmacy. As he passed the
