The boy was clearly infatuated. She looked like a debutante, and, knowing it, acted the part. It was not acting really. Life had only touched her so far, and had left no mark. When Lethway lounged away to an evening's bridge Cecil fetched his military cape and they went on deck.
"I'm afraid it's rather lonely for you," he said. "It's always like this the first day or two. Then the women warm up and get friendly."
"I don't want to know them. They are a stupid-looking lot. Did you ever see such clothes?"
"You are the only person who looks like a lady to-night," he observed. "You look lovely. I hope you don't mind my saying it?"
She was a downright young person, after all. And there was something about the boy that compelled candour. So, although she gathered after a time that he did not approve of chorus girls, was even rather skeptical about them and believed that the stage should be an uplifting influence, she told him about herself that night.
It was a blow. He rallied gallantly, but she could see him straggling to gain this new point of view.
"Anyhow," he said at last, "you're not like the others." Then hastily: "I don't mean to offend you when I say that, you know. Only one can tell, to look at you, that you are different." He thought that sounded rather boyish, and remembered that he was going to the war, and was, or would soon be, a fighting man. "I've known a lot of girls," he added rather loftily. "All sorts of girls."
It was the next night that Lethway kissed her. He had left her alone most of the day, and by sheer gravitation of loneliness she and the boy drifted together. All day long they ranged the ship, watched a boxing match in the steerage, fed bread to the hovering gulls from the stern. They told each other many things. There had been a man in the company who had wanted to marry her, but she intended to have a career. Anyhow, she would not marry unless she loved a person very much.
He eyed her wistfully when she said that.
At dusk he told her about the girl in Toronto.
"It wasn't an engagement, you understand. But we've been awfully good friends. She came to see me off. It was rather awful. She cried. She had some sort of silly idea that I'll get hurt."
It was her turn to look wistful. Oh, they were getting on! When he went to ask the steward to bring tea to the corner they had found, she looked after him. She had been so busy with her own worries that she had not thought much of the significance of his neatly belted khaki. Suddenly it hurt her. He was going to war.
She knew little about the war, except from the pictures in illustrated magazines. Once or twice she had tried to talk about it with Mabel, but Mabel had only said, "It's fierce!" and changed the subject.
The uniforms scattered over the ship and the precautions taken at night, however, were bringing this thing called war very close to her. It was just beyond that horizon toward which they were heading. And even then it was brought nearer to her.
Under cover of the dusk the girl she had tried to approach came up and stood beside her. Edith was very distant with her.
"The nights make me nervous," the girl said. "In the daylight it is not so bad. But these darkened windows bring it all home to me—the war, you know."
"I guess it's pretty bad."
"It's bad enough. My brother has been wounded. I am going to him."
Even above the sound of the water Edith caught the thrill in her voice. It was a new tone to her, the exaltation of sacrifice.
"I'm sorry," she said. And some subconscious memory of Mabel made her say: "It's fierce!"
The girl looked at her.
"That young officer you're with, he's going, of course. He seems very young. My brother was older. Thirty."
"He's twenty-two."
"He has such nice eyes," said the girl. "I wish——"
But he was coming back, and she slipped away.
During tea Cecil caught her eyes on him more than once. He had taken off his stiff-crowned cap, and the wind blew his dark hair round.
"I wish you were not going to the war," she said unexpectedly. It had come home to her, all at once, the potentialities of that trim uniform. It made her a little sick.
"It's nice of you to say that."
There was a new mood on her, of confession, almost of consecration. He asked her if he might smoke. No one in her brief life had ever before asked her permission to smoke.
"I'll have to smoke all I can," he said. "The fellows say cigarettes are scarce in the trenches. I'm taking a lot over."
He knew a girl who smoked cigarettes, he said. She was a nice girl too. He couldn't understand it. The way he felt about it, maybe a cigarette for a girl wasn't a crime. But it led to other things—drinking, you know, and all that.
"The fellows don't respect a girl that smokes," he said. "That's the plain truth. I've talked to her a lot about it."
"It wasn't your friend in Toronto, was it?"
"Good heavens, no!" He repudiated the idea with horror.
It was the girl who had to readjust her ideas of life that day. She had been born and raised in that neutral ground between the lines of right and wrong, and now suddenly her position was attacked and she must choose sides. She chose.
"I've smoked a cigarette now and then. If you think it is wrong I'll not do it any more."
He was almost overcome, both at the confession and at her renunciation. To tell the truth, among the older Canadian officers he had felt rather a boy. Her promise reinstated him in his own esteem. He was a man, and a girl was offering to give something up if he wished it. It helped a lot.
That evening he laid out his entire equipment in his small cabin, and invited her to see it. He put his mother's picture behind his brushes, where the other one had been, and when all was ready he rang for a stewardess.
"I am going to show a young lady some of my stuff," he explained. "And as she is alone I wish you'd stay round, will you? I want her to feel perfectly comfortable."
The stewardess agreed, and as she was an elderly woman, with a son at the front, a boy like Cecil, she went back to her close little room over the engines and cried a little, very quietly.
It was unfortunate that he did not explain the presence of the stewardess to the girl. For when it was all over, and she had stood rather awed before his mother's picture, and rather to his surprise had smoothed her hair with one of his brushes, she turned to him outside the door.
"That stewardess has a lot of nerve," she said. "The idea of standing in the doorway, rubbering!"
"I asked her," he explained. "I thought you'd prefer having some one there."
She stared at him.
II
Lethway had won the ship's pool that day. In the evening he played bridge, and won again. He had been drinking a little. Not much, but enough to make him reckless.
For the last rubber or two the thought of Edith had obsessed him, her hand on the rail as he had kissed it, her cool eyes that were at once so wise and so ignorant, her lithe body in the short skirt and middy blouse. He found her more alluring, so attired, than she had been in the scant costume of what to him was always "the show."
He pondered on that during all of a dummy hand, sitting low in his chair with his feet thrust far under the table. The show business was going to the bad. Why? Because nobody connected with it knew anything about human nature. He formulated a plan, compounded of liquor and real business acumen, of dressing a chorus, of suggesting the feminine form instead of showing it, of veiling it in chiffons of soft colours and sending a draft of air from electric fans in the wings to set the chiffons in motion.
"Like the Aurora," he said to himself. "Only not so beefy. Ought to be a hit. Pretty? It will be the real thing!"
The thought of Edith in such a costume, playing like a dryad over the stage, stayed with him when the dummy hand had been played and he had been recalled to the game by a thump on the shoulder. Edith in soft, pastel-coloured chiffons, dancing in bare feet to light string music. A forest setting, of course. Pan. A goat or two. All that sort of thing.
On his way down to his cabin he passed her door. He went on, hesitated, came back and knocked.
Now Edith had not been able to sleep. Her thrifty soul, trained against waste, had urged her not to fling her cigarettes overboard, but to smoke them.
"And then never again," she said solemnly.
The result was that she could not get to sleep. Blanketed to the chin she lay in her bunk, reading. The book had been Mabel's farewell offering, a thing of perverted ideals, or none, of cheap sentiment, of erotic thought overlaid with words. The immediate result of it, when she yawned at last and turned out the light over her bed, was a new light on the boy.
"Little prig!" she said to herself, and stretched her round arms luxuriously above her head.
Then Lethway rapped. She sat up and listened. Then, grumbling, she got out and opened the door an inch or two. The lights were low outside and her own cabin dark. But she knew him.
"Are we chased?" she demanded. In the back of her mind, fear of pursuit by a German submarine was dogging her across the Atlantic.
"Sure we are!" he said. "What are you so stingy about the door for?"
She recognised his condition out of a not inconsiderable experience and did her best to force the door shut, but he put his foot over the sill and smiled.
"Please go away, Mr. Lethway."
"I'll go if you'll kiss me good night."
She calculated the situation, and surrendered. There was nothing else to do. But when she upturned her face he slipped past her and into the room. Just inside the door, swinging open and shut with every roll of the ship, he took her in his arms and kissed her, not once but many times.
She did not lose her head. She had an arm free and she rang the bell. Then she jerked herself loose.
"I have rung for the stewardess," she said furiously. "If you are here when she comes I'll ask for help."
"You young devil!" was all he said, and went, slamming the door behind him. His rage grew as he reached his own cabin. Damn the girl, anyhow! He had not meant anything. Here he was, spending money he might never get back to give her a chance, and she called the stewardess because he kissed her!
As for the girl, she went back to bed. For a few moments sheer rage kept her awake. Then youth and fatigue triumphed and she fell asleep. Her last thought was of the boy, after all. "He wouldn't do a thing like that," she reflected. "He's a gentleman. He's the real thing. He's——"
Her eyes closed.
Lethway apologised the next day, apologised with an excess of manner that somehow made the apology as much of an insult as the act. But she matched him at that game—took her cue from him, even went him one better as to manner. When he left her he had begun to feel that she was no unworthy antagonist. The game would be interesting. And she had the advantage, if she only knew it. Back of his desire to get back at her, back of his mocking smile and half-closed eyes, he was just a trifle mad about her since the night before.
That is the way things stood when they reached the Mersey. Cecil was in love with the girl. Very earnestly in love. He did not sleep at night for thinking about her. He remembered certain semi-harmless escapades of his college days, and called himself unworthy and various other things. He scourged himself by leaving her alone in her steamer chair and walking by at stated intervals. Once, in a white sweater over a running shirt, he went to the gymnasium and found her there. She had on a "gym" suit of baggy bloomers and the usual blouse. He backed away from the door hastily.
At first he was jealous of Lethway. Then that passed. She confided to him that she did not like the manager. After that he was sorry for him. He was sorry for any one she did not like. He bothered Lethway by walking the deck with him and looking at him with what Lethway refused to think was compassion.
But because, contrary to the boy's belief, none of us is quite good or quite evil, he was kind to the boy. The khaki stood for something which no Englishman could ignore.
"Poor little devil!" he said on the last day in the smoking room, "he's going to a bad time, all right. I was in Africa for eight years. Boer war and the rest of it. Got run through the thigh in a native uprising, and they won't have me now. But Africa was cheery to this war."
He asked the boy into the smoking room, which he had hitherto avoided. He had some queer idea that he did not care to take his uniform in there. Absurd, of course. It made him rather lonely in the hours Edith spent in her cabin, preparing variations of costume for the evening out of her small trunk. But he was all man, and he liked the society of men; so he went at last, with Lethway, and ordered vichy!
He had not allowed himself to think much beyond the end of the voyage. As the ship advanced, war seemed to slip beyond the edge of his horizon. Even at night, as he lay and tossed, his thoughts were either of the next day, when he would see Edith again, or of that indefinite future when he would return, covered with honors, and go to her, wherever she was.
He never doubted the honors now. He had something to fight for. The medals in their cases looked paltry to him, compared with what was coming. In his sleep he dreamed of the V.C., dreams he was too modest to put into thoughts in waking hours.
Then they reached the Mersey. On the last evening of the voyage he and Edith stood on the upper deck. It was a zone of danger. From each side of the narrowing river flashlights skimmed the surface of the water, playing round but never on the darkened ship. Red and green lights blinked signals. Their progress was a devious one through the mine-strewn channel. There was a heavy sea even there, and the small lights on the mast on the pilot boat, as it came to a stop, described great arcs that seemed, first to starboard, then to port, to touch the very tips of the waves.
"I'm not crazy about this," the girl said, as the wind tugged at her skirts. "It frightens me. Brings the war pretty close, doesn't it?"
Emotion swelled his heart and made him husky—love and patriotism, pride and hope, and a hot burst of courage.
"What if we strike a mine?" she asked.
"I wouldn't care so much. It would give me a chance to save you."
Overhead they were signalling the shore with a white light. Along with the new emotions that were choking him came an unaccustomed impulse of boastfulness.
"I can read that," he said when she ignored his offer to save her. "Of course it's code, but I can spell it out."
He made a move to step forward and watch the signaler, but she put her hand on his arm.
"Don't go. I'm nervous, Cecil," she said.
She had called him by his first name. It shook him profoundly, that and the touch of her hand on his arm.
"Oh, I love you, love you!" he said hoarsely. But he did not try to take her in his arms, or attempt to caress the hand that still clung to him. He stood very erect, looking at the shadowy outline of her. Then, her long scarf blowing toward him, he took the end of it and kissed that very gravely.
"I would die for you," he said.
Then Lethway joined them.
III
London was not kind to him. He had felt, like many Canadians, that in going to England he was going home. But England was cold.
Not the people on the streets. They liked the Canadians and they cheered them when their own regiments went by unhailed. It appealed to their rampant patriotism that these men had come from across the sea to join hands with them against common foe. But in the clubs, where his letters admitted the boy, there was a different atmosphere. Young British officers were either cool or, much worse, patronising. They were inclined to suspect that his quiet confidence was swanking. One day at luncheon he drank a glass of wine, not because he wanted it but because he did not like to refuse. The result was unfortunate. It loosened his tongue a bit, and he mentioned the medals.
Not noisily, of course. In an offhand manner, to his next neighbor. It went round the table, and a sort of icy silence, after that, greeted his small sallies. He never knew what the trouble was, but his heart was heavy in him.
And it rained.
It was always raining. He had ver
y little money beyond his pay, and the constant hiring of taxicabs worried him. Now and then he saw some one he knew, down from Salisbury for a holiday, but they had been over long enough to know their way about. They had engagements, things to buy. He fairly ate his heart out in sheer loneliness.
There were two hours in the day that redeemed the others. One was the hour late in the afternoon when, rehearsal over, he took Edith O'Hara to tea. The other was just before he went to bed, when he wrote her the small note that reached her every morning with her breakfast.
In the seven days before he joined his regiment at Salisbury he wrote her seven notes. They were candid, boyish scrawls, not love letters at all. This was one of them:
Dear Edith: I have put in a rotten evening and am just going to bed. I am rather worried because you looked so tired to-day. Please don't work too hard.
I am only writing to say how I look forward each night to seeing you the next day. I am sending with this a small bunch of lilies of the valley. They remind me of you.
Cecil.
The girl saved those letters. She was not in love with him, but he gave her something no one else had ever offered: a chivalrous respect that pleased as well as puzzled her.
Once in a tea shop he voiced his creed, as it pertained to her, over a plate of muffins.
"When we are both back home, Edith," he said, "I am going to ask you something."
"Why not now?"
"Because it wouldn't be quite fair to you. I—I may be killed, or something. That's one thing. Then, it's because of your people."
That rather stunned her. She had no people. She was going to tell him that, but she decided not to. She felt quite sure that he considered "people" essential, and though she felt that, for any long period of time, these queer ideas and scruples of his would be difficult to live up to, she intended to do it for that one week.
"Oh, all right," she said, meekly enough.
She felt very tender toward him after that, and her new gentleness made it all hard for him. She caught him looking at her wistfully at times, and it seemed to her that he was not looking well. His eyes were hollow, his face thin. She put her hand over his as it lay on the table.
The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart Page 433
