The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  "I wouldn't do that," he said soothingly. "You can put it somewhere, can't you? Maybe Rosie'll know."

  "I don't want it to live."

  For the first time he realised her despair. She turned on him her tormented eyes, and he quailed.

  "I'll find a place for it, kid," he said. "It's mine, too. I guess I'm it, all right."

  "Yours!" She half rose on her elbow, weak as she was. "Yours! Didn't you throw me over when you found I was going to have it? Yours! Did you go through hell for twenty-four hours to bring it into the world? I tell you, it's mine—mine! And I'll do what I want with it. I'll kill it, and myself too!"

  "You don't know what you're saying!"

  She had dropped back, white and exhausted.

  "Don't I?" she said, and fell silent.

  Al felt defrauded, ill-treated. He had done the right thing; he had come to see the girl, which wasn't customary in those circles where Al lived and worked and had his being; he had acknowledged his responsibility, and even—why, hang it all——

  "Say the word and I'll marry you," he said magnanimously.

  "I don't want to marry you."

  He drew a breath of relief. Nothing could have been fairer than his offer, and she had refused it. He wished Rosie had been there to hear.

  And just then Rosie came. She carried the baby, still faintly odorous of violets, held tight in unaccustomed arms. She looked awkward and conscious, but her amused smile at herself was half tender.

  "Hello, Claribel," she said. "How are you? Just look here, Al! What do you think of this?"

  Al got up sheepishly and looked at the child.

  "Boy or girl?" he asked politely.

  "Girl; but it's the living image of you," said Rose—for Rose and the Nurse were alike in the wiles of the serpent.

  "Looks like me!" Al observed caustically. "Looks like an over-ripe tomato!"

  But he drew himself up a trifle. Somewhere in his young and hardened soul the germs of parental pride, astutely sowed, had taken quick root.

  "Feel how heavy she is," Rose commanded. And Al held out two arms unaccustomed to such tender offices.

  "Heavy! She's about as big as a peanut."

  "Mind her back," said Rose, remembering instructions.

  After her first glance Claribel had not looked at the child. But now, in its father's arms, it began to whimper. The mother stirred uneasily, and frowned.

  "Take it away!" she ordered. "I told them not to bring it here."

  The child cried louder. Its tiny red face, under the powder, turned purple. It beat the air with its fists. Al, still holding it in his outstretched arms, began vague motions to comfort it, swinging it up and down and across. But it cried on, drawing up its tiny knees in spasms of distress. Claribel put her fingers in her ears.

  "You'll have to feed it!" Rose shouted over the din.

  The girl comprehended without hearing, and shook her head in sullen obstinacy.

  "What do you think of that for noise?" said Al, not without pride. "She's like me, all right. When I'm hungry, there's hell to pay if I'm not fed quick. Here,"—he bent down over Claribel,—"you might as well have dinner now, and stop the row."

  Not ungently, he placed the squirming mass in the baptismal dress beside the girl on the bed. With the instinct of ages, the baby stopped wailing and opened her mouth.

  "The little cuss!" cried Al, delighted. "Ain't that me all over? Little angel-face the minute I get to the table!"

  Unresisting now, Claribel let Rose uncover her firm white breast. The mother's arm, passively extended by Rose to receive the small body, contracted around it unconsciously.

  She turned and looked long at the nuzzling, eager mouth, at the red hand lying trustfully open on her breast, at the wrinkled face, the indeterminate nose, the throbbing fontanelle where the little life was already beating so hard.

  "A girl, Rose!" she said. "My God, what am I going to do with her?"

  Rose was not listening. The Junior Medical's turn had come at last. Downstairs in the chapel, he was standing by the organ, his head thrown back, his heavy brown hair (which would never stay parted without the persuasion of brilliantine) bristling with earnestness.

  "O'er all the way, green palms and blossoms gay,"

  he sang, and his clear tenor came welling up the staircase to Liz, and past her to the ward, and to the group behind the screen.

  "Are strewn this day in festal preparation,

  Where Jesus comes to wipe our tears away—

  E'en now the throng to welcome Him prepare."

  On the throne-chair by the record-table, the Nurse sat and listened. And because it was Easter and she was very happy and because of the thrill in the tenor voice that came up the stairs to her, and because of the page in the order-book about bran baths and the rest of it, she cried a little, surreptitiously, and let the tears drop down on a yellow hospital record.

  The song was almost done. Liz, on the stairs, had fed her baby twenty minutes too soon, and now it lay, sleeping and sated, in her lap. Liz sat there, brooding over it, and the last line of the song came up the staircase.

  "Blessed is He who comes bringing sal-va-a-a-ation!"

  the Junior Medical sang.

  The services were over. Downstairs the small crowd dispersed slowly. The minister shook hands with the nurses at the door, and the Junior Medical rolled up his song and wondered how soon he could make rounds upstairs again.

  Liz got up, with her baby in her arms, and padded in to the throne-chair by the record-table.

  "He can sing some, can't he!" she said.

  "He has a beautiful voice." The Nurse's eyes were shining.

  Liz moved off. Then she turned and came back.

  "I—I know you'll tell me I'm a fool," she said; "but I've decided to keep the kid, this time. I guess I'll make out, somehow."

  Behind the screen, Rosie had lighted a cigarette and was smoking, sublimely unconscious of the blue smoke swirl that rose in telltale clouds high above her head. The baby had dropped asleep, and Claribel lay still. But her eyes were not on the ceiling; they were on the child.

  Al leaned forward and put his lips to the arm that circled the baby.

  "I'm sorry, kid," he said. "I guess it was the limit, all right. Do you hate me?"

  She looked at him, and the hardness and defiance died out of her eyes. She shook her head.

  "No."

  "Do you—still—like me a little?"

  "Yes," in a whisper.

  "Then what's the matter with you and me and the little mutt getting married and starting all over—eh?"

  He leaned over and buried his face with a caressing movement in the hollow of her neck.

  Rose extinguished her cigarette on the foot of the bed, and, careful of appearances, put the butt in her chatelaine.

  "I guess you two don't need me any more," she said yawning. "I'm going back home to bed."

  "ARE WE DOWNHEARTED? NO!"

  I

  There are certain people who will never understand this story, people who live their lives by rule of thumb. Little lives they are, too, measured by the letter and not the spirit. Quite simple too. Right is right and wrong is wrong.

  That shadowy No Man's Land between the trenches of virtue and sin, where most of us fight our battles and are wounded, and even die, does not exist for them.

  The boy in this story belonged to that class. Even if he reads it he may not recognise it. But he will not read it or have it read to him. He will even be somewhat fretful if it comes his way.

  "If that's one of those problem things," he will say, "I don't want to hear it. I don't see why nobody writes adventure any more."

  Right is right and wrong is wrong. Seven words for a creed, and all of life to live!

  This is not a war story. But it deals, as must anything that represents life in this year of our Lord of Peace, with war. With war in its human relations. Not with guns and trenches, but with men and women, with a boy and a girl.

  For only in th
e mass is war vast. To the man in the trench it reduces itself to the man on his right, the man on his left, the man across, beyond the barbed wire, and a woman.

  The boy was a Canadian. He was twenty-two and not very tall. His name in this story is Cecil Hamilton. He had won two medals for life-saving, each in a leather case. He had saved people from drowning. When he went abroad to fight he took the medals along. Not to show. But he felt that the time might come when he would not be sure of himself. A good many men on the way to war have felt that way. The body has a way of turning craven, in spite of high resolves. It would be rather comforting, he felt, to have those medals somewhere about him at that time. He never looked at them without a proud little intake of breath and a certain swelling of the heart.

  On the steamer he found that a medal for running had slipped into one of the cases. He rather chuckled over that. He had a sense of humour, in spite of his seven-word creed. And a bit of superstition, for that night, at dusk, he went out on to the darkened deck and flung it overboard.

  The steamer had picked him up at Halifax—a cold dawn, with a few pinched faces looking over the rail. Forgive him if he swaggered up the gangway. He was twenty-two, he was a lieutenant, and he was a fighting man.

  The girl in the story saw him then. She was up and about, in a short sport suit, with a white tam-o'-shanter on her head and a white woolen scarf tucked round her neck. Under her belted coat she wore a middy blouse, and when she saw Lieutenant Cecil Hamilton, with his eager eyes—not unlike her own, his eyes were young and inquiring—she reached into a pocket of the blouse and dabbed her lips with a small stick of cold cream.

  Cold air has a way of drying lips.

  He caught her at it, and she smiled. It was all over for him then, poor lad!

  Afterward, when he was in the trenches, he wondered about that. He called it "Kismet" to himself. It was really a compound, that first day or two, of homesickness and a little furtive stirring of anxiety and the thrill of new adventure that was in his blood.

  On the second afternoon out they had tea together, she in her steamer chair and he calmly settled next to her, in a chair belonging to an irritated English lawyer. Afterward he went down to his cabin, hung round with his new equipment, and put away the photograph of a very nice Toronto girl, which had been propped up back of his hairbrushes.

  They got rather well acquainted that first day.

  "You know," he said, with his cup in one hand and a rather stale cake in the other, "it's awfully bully of you to be so nice to me."

  She let that go. She was looking, as a matter of fact, after a tall man with heavily fringed eyes and English clothes, who had just gone by.

  "You know," he confided—he frequently prefaced his speeches with that—"I was horribly lonely when I came up the gangway. Then I saw you, and you were smiling. It did me a lot of good."

  "I suppose I really should not have smiled." She came back to him with rather an effort. "But you caught me, you know. It wasn't rouge. It was cold cream. I'll show you."

  She unbuttoned her jacket, against his protest, and held out the little stick. He took it and looked at it.

  "You don't need even this," he said rather severely. He disapproved of cosmetics. "You have a lovely mouth."

  "It's rather large. Don't you think so?"

  "It's exactly right."

  He was young, and as yet more interested in himself than in anything in the world. So he sat there and told her who he was, and what he hoped to do and, rather to his own astonishment, about the medals.

  "How very brave you are!" she said.

  That made him anxious. He hoped she did not think he was swanking. It was only that he did not make friends easily, and when he did meet somebody he liked he was apt to forget and talk too much about himself. He was so afraid that he gulped down his tepid tea in a hurry and muttered something about letters to write, and got himself away. The girl stared after him with a pucker between her eyebrows. And the tall man came and took the place he vacated.

  Things were worrying the girl—whose name, by the way, was Edith. On programs it was spelled "Edythe," but that was not her fault. Yes, on programs—Edythe O'Hara. The business manager had suggested deHara, but she had refused. Not that it mattered much. She had been in the chorus. She had a little bit of a voice, rather sweet, and she was divinely young and graceful.

  In the chorus she would have remained, too, but for one of those queer shifts that alter lives. A girl who did a song and an eccentric dance had wrenched her knee, and Edith had gone on in her place. Something of her tomboy youth remained in her, and for a few minutes, as she frolicked over the stage, she was a youngster, dancing to her shadow.

  She had not brought down the house, but a man with heavily fringed eyes, who watched her from the wings, made a note of her name. He was in America for music-hall material for England, and he was shrewd after the manner of his kind. Here was a girl who frolicked on the stage. The English, accustomed to either sensuous or sedate dancing, would fall hard for her, he decided. Either that, or she would go "bla." She was a hit or nothing.

  And that, in so many words, he told her that afternoon.

  "Feeling all right?" he asked her.

  "Better than this morning. The wind's gone down, hasn't it?"

  He did not answer her. He sat on the side of the chair and looked her over.

  "You want to keep well," he warned her. "The whole key to your doing anything is vitality. That's the word—Life."

  She smiled. It seemed so easy. Life? She was full-fed with the joy of it. Even as she sat, her active feet in their high-heeled shoes were aching to be astir.

  "Working in the gymnasium?" he demanded.

  "Two hours a day, morning and evening. Feel."

  She held out her arm to him, and he felt its small, rounded muscle, with a smile. But his heavily fringed eyes were on her face, and he kept his hold until she shook it off.

  "Who's the soldier boy?" he asked suddenly.

  "Lieutenant Hamilton. He's rather nice. Don't you think so?"

  "He'll do to play with on the trip. You'll soon lose him in London."

  The winter darkness closed down round them. Stewards were busy closing ports and windows with fitted cardboards. Through the night the ship would travel over the dangerous lanes of the sea with only her small port and starboard lights. A sense of exhilaration possessed Edith. This hurling forward over black water, this sense of danger, visualised by precautions, this going to something new and strange, set every nerve to jumping. She threw back her rug, and getting up went to the rail. Lethway, the manager, followed her.

  "Nervous, aren't you?"

  "Not frightened, anyhow."

  It was then that he told her how he had sized the situation up. She was a hit or nothing.

  "If you go all right," he said, "you can have the town. London's for you or against you, especially if you're an American. If you go flat——"

  "Then what?"

  She had not thought of that. What would she do then? Her salary was not to begin until the performances started. Her fare and expenses across were paid, but how about getting back? Even at the best her salary was small. That had been one of her attractions to Lethway.

  "I'll have to go home, of course," she said. "If they don't like me, and decide in a hurry, I—I may have to borrow money from you to get back."

  "Don't worry about that." He put a hand over hers as it lay on the rail, and when she made no effort to release it he bent down and kissed her warm fingers. "Don't you worry about that," he repeated.

  She did worry, however. Down in her cabin, not so tidy as the boy's—littered with her curiously anomalous belongings, a great bunch of violets in the wash bowl, a cheap toilet set, elaborate high-heeled shoes, and a plain muslin nightgown hanging to the door—down there she opened her trunk and got out her contract. There was nothing in it about getting back home.

  For a few minutes she was panicky. Her hands shook as she put the document away. She knew life w
ith all the lack of illusion of two years in the chorus. Even Lethway—not that she minded his casual caress on the deck. She had seen a lot of that. It meant nothing. Stage directors either bawled you out or petted you. That was part of the business.

  But to-night, all day indeed, there had been something in Lethway's face that worried her. And there were other things.

  The women on the boat replied coldly to her friendly advances. She had spoken to a nice girl, her own age or thereabouts, and the girl's mother or aunt or chaperon, whoever it was, had taken her away. It had puzzled her at the time. Now she knew. The crowd that had seen her off, from the Pretty Coquette Company—that had queered her, she decided. That and Lethway.

  None of the girls had thought it odd that she should cross the ocean with Lethway. They had been envious, as a matter of fact. They had brought her gifts, the queer little sachets and fruit and boxes of candy that littered the room. In that half hour before sailing they had chattered about her, chorus unmistakably, from their smart, cheap little hats to their short skirts and fancy shoes. Her roommate, Mabel, had been the only one she had hated to leave. And Mabel had queered her, too, with her short-bobbed yellow hair.

  She did a reckless thing that night, out of pure defiance. It was a winter voyage in wartime. The night before the women had gone down, sedately dressed, to dinner. The girl she had tried to speak to had worn a sweater. So Edith dressed for dinner.

  She whitened her neck and arms with liquid powder, and slicked up her brown hair daringly smooth and flat. Then she put on her one evening dress, a black net, and pinned on her violets. She rouged her lips a bit too.

  The boy, meeting her on the companionway, gasped.

  That night he asked permission to move over to her table, and after that the three of them ate together, Lethway watching and saying little, the other two chattering. They were very gay. They gambled to the extent of a quarter each, on the number of fronds, or whatever they are, in the top of a pineapple that Cecil ordered in, and she won. It was delightful to gamble, she declared, and put the fifty cents into a smoking-room pool.