DEFEAT
March in the country around was rare with jasmine and jonquils and
patches of violets in the warming grass. Afterward he remembered
especially one afternoon of such a fresh and magic glamour that as he
stood in the rifle-pit marking targets he recited "Atalanta in Calydon"
to an uncomprehending Pole, his voice mingling with the rip, sing, and
splatter of the bullets overhead.
"When the hounds of spring ..."
_Spang!_
"Are on winter's traces ..."
_Whirr-r-r-r!_ ...
"The mother of months ..."
_"Hey!_ Come to! Mark three-e-e! ..."
In town the streets were in a sleepy dream again, and together Anthony
and Dot idled in their own tracks of the previous autumn until he began
to feel a drowsy attachment for this South--a South, it seemed, more of
Algiers than of Italy, with faded aspirations pointing back over
innumerable generations to some warm, primitive Nirvana, without hope or
care. Here there was an inflection of cordiality, of comprehension, in
every voice. "Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of
us," they seemed to say in their plaintive pleasant cadence, in the
rising inflection terminating on an unresolved minor.
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