It was the next day that she saw his name among the missing.
She did not cry, not at first. The time came when it seemed to her she did nothing else. But at first she only stared. She was too young and too strong to faint, but things went gray for her.
And gray they remained—through long spring days and eternal nights—days when Mabel slept all morning, rehearsed or played in the afternoons, was away all evening and far into the night. She did not eat or sleep. She spent money that was meant for food on papers and journals and searched for news. She made a frantic but ineffectual effort to get into the War Office.
She had received his letter two days after she had seen his name among the missing. She had hardly dared to open it, but having read it, for days she went round with a strange air of consecration that left Mabel uneasy.
"I wish you wouldn't look like that!" she said one morning. "You get on my nerves."
But as time went on the feeling that he was dead overcame everything else. She despaired, rather than grieved. And following despair came recklessness. He was dead. Nothing else mattered. Lethway, meeting her one day in Oxford Circus, almost passed her before he knew her. He stopped her then.
"Haven't been sick, have you?"
"Me? No."
"There's something wrong."
She did not deny it and he fell into step beside her.
"Doing anything?" he asked.
She shook her head. With all the power that was in her she was hating his tall figure, his heavy-lashed eyes, even the familiar ulster he wore.
"I wish you were a sensible young person," he said. But something in the glance she gave him forbade his going on. It was not an ugly glance. Rather it was cold, appraising—even, if he had known it, despairing.
Lethway had been busy. She had been in the back of his mind rather often, but other things had crowded her out. This new glimpse of her fired him again, however. And she had a new quality that thrilled even through the callus of his soul. The very thing that had foredoomed her to failure in the theatre appealed to him strongly—a refinement, a something he did not analyse.
When she was about to leave him he detained her with a hand on her arm.
"You know you can always count on me, don't you?" he said.
"I know I can't," she flashed back at him with a return of her old spirit.
"I'm crazy about you."
"Old stuff!" she said coolly, and walked off. But there was a tug of fear at her heart. She told Mabel, but it was typical of the change that Mabel only shrugged her shoulders.
It was Lethway's shrewdness that led to his next move. He had tried bullying, and failed. He had tried fear, with the same lack of effect. Now he tried kindness.
She distrusted him at first, but her starved heart was crying out for the very thing he offered her. As the weeks went on, with no news of Cecil, she accepted his death stoically at last. Something of her had died. But in a curious way the boy had put his mark on her. And as she grew more like the thing he had thought her to be the gulf between Mabel and herself widened. They had, at last, only in common their room, their struggle, the contacts of their daily life.
And Lethway was now always in the background. He took her for quiet meals and brought her home early. He promised her that sometime he would see that she got back home.
"But not just yet," he added as her colour rose. "I'm selfish, Edith. Give me a little time to be happy."
That was a new angle. It had been a part of the boy's quiet creed to make others happy.
"Why don't you give me something to do, since you're so crazy to have me hanging about?"
"Can't do it. I'm not the management. And they're sore at you. They think you threw them down." He liked to air his American slang.
Edith cupped her chin in her hand and looked at him. There was no mystery about the situation, no shyness in the eyes with which she appraised him. She was beginning to like him too.
That night when she got back to Mabel's apartment her mood was reckless. She went to the window and stood looking at the crooked and chimney-potted skyline that was London.
"Oh, what's the use?" she said savagely, and gave up the fight.
When Mabel came home she told her.
"I'm going to get out," she said without preamble.
She caught the relief in Mabel's face, followed by a purely conventional protest.
"Although," she hedged cautiously, "I don't know, dearie. People look at things sensibly these days. You've got to live, haven't you? They're mighty quick to jail a girl who tries to jump in the river when she's desperate."
"I'll probably end there. And I don't much care."
Mabel gave her a good talking to about that. Her early training had been in a church which regarded self-destruction as a cardinal sin. Then business acumen asserted itself:
"He'll probably put you on somewhere. He's crazy about you, Ede."
But Edith was not listening. She was standing in front of her opened trunk tearing into small pieces something that had been lying in the tray.
VII
Now the boy had tried very hard to die, and failed. The thing that had happened to him was an unbelievable thing. When he began to use his tired faculties again, when the ward became not a shadow land but a room, and the nurse not a presence but a woman, he tried feebly to move his right arm.
But it was gone.
At first he refused to believe it. He could feel it lying there beside him. It ached and throbbed. The fingers were cramped. But when he looked it was not there.
There was not one shock of discovery, but many. For each time he roused from sleep he had forgotten, and must learn the thing again.
The elderly German woman stayed close. She was wise, and war had taught her many things. So when he opened his eyes she was always there. She talked to him very often of his mother, and he listened with his eyes on her face—eyes like those of a sick child.
In that manner they got by the first few days.
"It won't make any difference to her," he said once. "She'd take me back if I was only a fragment." Then bitterly: "That's all I am—a fragment! A part of a man!"
After a time she knew that there was a some one else, some one he was definitely relinquishing. She dared not speak to him about it. His young dignity was militant. But one night, as she dozed beside him in the chair, he reached the limit of his repression and told her.
"An actress!" she cried, sitting bolt upright. "Du lieber—an actress!"
"Not an actress," he corrected her gravely. "A—a dancer. But good. She's a very good girl. Even when I was—was whole"—raging bitterness there—"I was not good enough for her."
"No actress is good. And dancers!"
"You don't know what you are talking about," he said roughly, and turned his back to her. It was almost insulting to have her assist him to his attitude of contempt, and to prop him in it with pillows behind his back. Lying there he tried hard to remember that this woman belonged to his hereditary foes. He was succeeding in hating her when he felt her heavy hand on his head.
"Poor boy! Poor little one!" she said. And her voice was husky.
When at last he was moved from the hospital to the prison camp she pinned the sleeve of his ragged uniform across his chest and kissed him, to his great discomfiture. Then she went to the curtained corner that was her quarters and wept long and silently.
The prison camp was overcrowded. Early morning and late evening prisoners were lined up to be counted. There was a medley of languages—French, English, Arabic, Russian. The barracks were built round a muddy inclosure in which the men took what exercise they could.
One night a boy with a beautiful tenor voice sang Auld Lang Syne under the boy's window. He stood with his hand on the cuff of his empty sleeves and listened. And suddenly a great shame filled him, that with so many gone forever, with men dying every minute of every hour, back at the lines, he had been so obsessed with himself. He was still bitter, but the bitterness was that he could not
go back again and fight.
When he had been in the camp a month he helped two British officers to escape. One of them had snubbed him in London months before. He apologised before he left.
"You're a man, Hamilton," he said. "All you Canadians are men. I've some things to tell when I get home."
The boy could not go with them. There would be canals to swim across, and there was his empty sleeve and weakness. He would never swim again, he thought. That night, as he looked at the empty beds of the men who had gone, he remembered his medals and smiled grimly.
He was learning to use his left hand. He wrote letters home with it for soldiers who could not write. He went into the prison hospital and wrote letters for those who would never go home. But he did not write to the girl.
He went back at last, when the hopelessly wounded were exchanged. To be branded "hopelessly wounded" was to him a stain, a stigma. It put him among the clutterers of the earth. It stranded him on the shore of life. Hopelessly wounded!
For, except what would never be whole, he was well again. True, confinement and poor food had kept him weak and white. His legs had a way of going shaky at nightfall. But once he knocked down an insolent Russian with his left hand, and began to feel his own man again. That the Russian was weak from starvation did not matter. The point to the boy was that he had made the attempt.
Providence has a curious way of letting two lives run along, each apparently independent of the other. Parallel lines they seem, hopeless of meeting. Converging lines really, destined, through long ages, by every deed that has been done to meet at a certain point and there fuse.
Edith had left Mabel, but not to go to Lethway. When nothing else remained that way was open. She no longer felt any horror—only a great distaste. But two weeks found her at her limit. She, who had rarely had more than just enough, now had nothing.
And no glory of sacrifice upheld her. She no longer believed that by removing the burden of her support she could save Mabel. It was clear that Mabel would not be saved. To go back and live on her, under the circumstances, was but a degree removed from the other thing that confronted her.
There is just a chance that, had she not known the boy, she would have killed herself. But again the curious change he had worked in her manifested itself. He thought suicide a wicked thing.
"I take it like this," he had said in his eager way: "life's a thing that's given us for some purpose. Maybe the purpose gets clouded—I'm afraid I'm an awful duffer at saying what I mean. But we've got to work it out, do you see? Or—or the whole scheme is upset."
It had seemed very clear then.
Then, on a day when the rare sun made even the rusty silk hats of clerks on tops of omnibuses to gleam, when the traffic glittered on the streets and the windows of silversmiths' shops shone painful to the eye, she met Lethway again.
The sun had made her reckless. Since the boy was gone life was wretchedness, but she clung to it. She had given up all hope of Cecil's return, and what she became mattered to no one else.
Perhaps, more than anything else, she craved companionship. In all her crowded young life she had never before been alone. Companionship and kindness. She would have followed to heel, like a dog, for a kind word.
Then she met Lethway. They walked through the park. When he left her her once clear, careless glance had a suggestion of furtiveness in it.
That afternoon she packed her trunk and sent it to an address he had given her. In her packing she came across the stick of cold cream, still in the pocket of the middy blouse. She flung it, as hard as she could, across the room.
She paid her bill with money Lethway had given her. She had exactly a sixpence of her own. She found herself in Trafalgar Square late in the afternoon. The great enlisting posters there caught her eye, filled her with bitterness.
"Your king and your country need you," she read. She had needed the boy, too, but this vast and impersonal thing, his mother country, had taken him from her—taken him and lost him. She wanted to stand by the poster and cry to the passing women to hold their men back. As she now knew she hated Lethway, she hated England.
She wandered on. Near Charing Cross she spent the sixpence for a bunch of lilies of the valley, because he had said once that she was like them. Then she was for throwing them in the street, remembering the thing she would soon be.
"For the wounded soldiers," said the flower girl. When she comprehended that, she made her way into the station. There was a great crowd, but something in her face made the crowd draw back and let her through. They nudged each other as she passed.
"Looking for some one, poor child!" said a girl and, following her, thrust the flowers she too carried into Edith's hand. She put them with the others, rather dazed.
To Cecil the journey had been a series of tragedies. Not his own. There were two hundred of them, officers and men, on the boat across the Channel. Blind, maimed, paralysed, in motley garments, they were hilariously happy. Every throb of the turbine engines was a thrust toward home. They sang, they cheered.
Now and then some one would shout: "Are we downhearted?" And crutches and canes would come down on the deck to the unanimous shout: "No!"
Folkestone had been trying, with its parade of cheerfulness, with kindly women on the platform serving tea and buns. In the railway coach to London, where the officers sat, a talking machine played steadily, and there were masses of flowers, violets and lilies of the valley. At Charing Cross was a great mass of people, and as they slowly disembarked he saw that many were crying. He was rather surprised. He had known London as a cold and unemotional place. It had treated him as an alien, had snubbed and ignored him.
He had been prepared to ask nothing of London, and it lay at his feet in tears.
Then he saw Edith.
Perhaps, when in the fullness of years the boy goes over to the life he so firmly believes awaits him, the one thing he will carry with him through the open door will be the look in her eyes when she saw him. Too precious a thing to lose, surely, even then. Such things make heaven.
"What did I tell you?" cried the girl who had given Edith her flowers. "She has found him. See, he has lost his arm. Look out—catch him!"
But he did not faint. He went even whiter, and looking at Edith he touched his empty sleeve.
"As if that would make any difference to her!" said the girl, who was in black. "Look at her face! She's got him."
Neither Edith nor the boy could speak. He was afraid of unmanly tears. His dignity was very dear to him. And the tragedy of his empty sleeve had her by the throat. So they went out together and the crowd opened to let them by.
At nine o'clock that night Lethway stormed through the stage entrance of the theatre and knocked viciously at the door of Mabel's dressing room. Receiving no attention, he opened the door and went in.
The room was full of flowers, and Mabel, ready to go on, was having her pink toes rouged for her barefoot dance.
"You've got a nerve!" she said coolly.
"Where's Edith?"
"I don't know and I don't care. She ran away, when I was stinting myself to keep her. I'm done. Now you go out and close that door, and when you want to enter a lady's dressing room, knock."
He looked at her with blazing hatred.
"Right-o!" was all he said. And he turned and left her to her flowers.
At exactly the same time Edith was entering the elevator of a small, very respectable hotel in Kensington. The boy, smiling, watched her in.
He did not kiss her, greatly to the disappointment of the hall porter. As the elevator rose the boy stood at salute, the fingers of his left hand to the brim of his shabby cap. In his eyes, as they followed her, was all that there is of love—love and a new understanding.
She had told him, and now he knew. His creed was still the same. Right was right and wrong was wrong. But he had learned of that shadowy No Man's Land between the lines, where many there were who fought their battles and were wounded, and even died.
As he tur
ned and went out two men on crutches were passing along the quiet street. They recognised him in the light of the doorway, and stopped in front of him. Their voices rang out in cheerful unison:
"Are we downhearted? No!"
Their crutches struck the pavement with a resounding thump.
THE GAME
I
The Red Un was very red; even his freckles were red rather than copper-coloured. And he was more prodigal than most kings, for he had two crowns on his head. Also his hair grew in varying directions, like a wheatfields after a storm. He wore a coat without a tail, but with brass buttons to compensate, and a celluloid collar with a front attached. It was the Red Un's habit to dress first and wash after, as saving labour; instead of his neck he washed his collar.
The Red Un was the Chief Engineer's boy and rather more impressive than the Chief, who was apt to decry his own greatness. It was the Red Un's duty to look after the Chief, carry in his meals, make his bed, run errands, and remind him to get his hair cut now and then. It was the Red Un's pleasure to assist unassumingly in the surveillance of that part of the ship where the great god, Steam, ruled an underworld of trimmers and oilers and stokers and assistant engineers—and even, with reservations, the Chief. The Red Un kept a sharp eye on the runs and read the Chief's log daily—so much coal in the bunkers; so much water in the wells; so many engine-room miles in twenty-four hours—which, of course, are not sea miles exactly, there being currents and winds, and God knows what, to waste steam on.
The Red Un, like the assistants, was becoming a bear on the speed market. He had learned that, just when the engines get heated enough to work like demons, and there is a chance to break a record and get a letter from the management, some current or other will show up—or a fog, which takes the very tripe out of the cylinders and sends the bridge yapping for caution.
The Red Un was thirteen; and he made the Chief's bed by pulling the counterpane neatly and smoothly over the chaos underneath—and got away with it, the Chief being weary at night. Also, in odd moments he made life miserable for the crew. Up to shortly before, he had had to use much energy and all his wits to keep life in his starved little body; and even keeping an eye on the log and the Chief's hair, and slipping down into the engine room, where he had no manner of business, hardly used up his activities. However, he did not lie and he looked the Chief square in the eye, as man to man.
The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart Page 435
