The Kingdom Round the Corner Part 3

"Yes, there's no denying that. Until the war ended, if you'd not seen her for a month, you were never quite sure how you ought to address her.

Even now one's liable to make a mistake. To-day she's Maisie Lockwood; to-morrow she may be Maisie Anything--Mrs. Adair Easterday, perhaps."

Under her willful mystifications his calmness was getting ruffled. While he listened to her, he kept comparing this day with the other day that his imagination had painted. The world was to have been so much better and kinder when the agony of the trenches was ended. It was in order that it might be better that so many men had not come back. And this was the kinder world--a world in which men, saved from the jaws of death, met the girls they had loved as strangers, in whose presence, if they were to avoid offense, they must pick their words! A world full of men like Adair, who had been honorable until others had made them safe by their sacrifice, and of women like Maisie of the many names, who forgot her yesterdays that she might seize her selfish personal happiness!

"Terry," he spoke with a show of patience, "do you think it's a matter about which to jest? There's your sister and her kiddies; their future's at stake. If I'm to be of any help----" He broke off, for a voice inside his brain had started talking, "You're old. That's exactly the way in which her father speaks to her." Was it her thoughts that he had heard?

Her face was lowered; he could see nothing but the top of her golden head. Youth radiated from her; even in his anger it intoxicated him.

"So if I'm to help," he picked up his thread, "you mustn't mock. It isn't decent, Terry; the situation's too serious. Let me have the facts.

How does she come by all these different names? Does she call herself something different with each new dress?"

Terry's eyes were wide and sorry. "No, with each new husband, but----"

There came a break in her voice, "Oh, Tabs, I can't bear that you should be cross with me. You've been disappointed in me from the moment we met.

We're not the same. And I know it's not all my fault. And----"

Her lips trembled. He was in terror lest she would give way to crying.

If it hadn't been for the table that parted them with its unromantic debris of dishes---- As it was he leant across and a.s.sured her earnestly, "I'm not cross with you, my dearest girl. I'm---- Terry, how is it that we've drifted so apart? I keep groping after the old Terry; for a minute I think I've found her, and then she's no longer there."

Drying her eyes, she nodded. "It hurts most frightfully. That's what I keep doing, barking my s.h.i.+ns in the dark, trying to follow the old Tabs.

He's always going away from me----"

"I think it's the laughter that I miss most," she said presently; "you've grown so stern."

"I've seen stern things happen--a kind of Judgment Day. It's remembered things that are so silencing."

"I know what you mean. I saw some of those things in our hospital in France." She shut her eyes as if the memory was unbearable. "But don't be hard on people who have a right to be young and who want to forget.

It isn't that they're ungrateful." Then she surprised him, "People like Maisie and myself."

"Don't couple yourself with her." He spoke more sharply than he had intended.

"But she was with me out there," she expostulated. "That was how she met her second husband, Gervis. She nursed him."

"It makes no difference how she met him; she's not in your cla.s.s--a woman who has been divorced three times."

"But she hasn't. Whatever made you think that?" Terry shot upright on her chair, for all the world like a startled rabbit.

"You told me she'd had three husbands." He was once more puzzled and uncertain of his ground. "You as good as said that she wouldn't be averse to making a fourth of Adair. I therefore conjectured----"

"You conjectured all wrong," she cut him short. "They died for their country."

"All of them?" He was making a rapid calculation as to how long could have elapsed between each re-marriage.

"One at a time, of course," she added. "She was married to the first the first week of the war."

"Even so it was quick work. May I light a cigarette? Three husbands in four years! She must be a very alluring person!"

Terry laughed nervously. "She is, though you mayn't think it. I can see you don't; you think she's horrid. But let me tell you it takes a smart woman to bring three men to the point of matrimony when the world's so full of unmarried girls. And they were every one of them more or less famous--the kind of men of whom any woman would be proud. You'll remember Pollock--Reggie Pollock; he was one of the earliest of our aces--the man who brought down the Zeppelin over Brussels and got killed himself a few days later, no one quite knew how. There was a mystery about his death. He was the man to whom she was first married."

"A splendid chap! And I recall her now. Her portrait was in the ill.u.s.trated papers at the time of her third marriage. It was headed _A Conscientious War-Worker_ or something like that. And I don't forget the name the soldiers called her when they read the papers in the trenches."

"Did they call her something?" She was gazing at him intently. "Was it something brutal that you wouldn't like to tell me?"

"It was something true," he said, pinching out his cigarette with quiet fierceness.

"Oh, I don't know----" She broke off to ask the waitress whether the car had arrived and was answered in the affirmative. "I don't know about its being true. After all, she made three men happy before they went West.

I don't see that she'd have been any more to be admired if she'd allowed the last two to go wretched."

Tabs half-rose and then reseated himself. "An awful woman! Insatiable! A Lucrezia Borgia, without Lucrezia Borgia's excuse."

"I knew you'd say that." Terry spoke hopelessly in a tone that dragged.

"How do you or I know what excuses she had? How do we know why anybody does anything--what hidden reasons they have? And yet we're always so eager to condemn! I wanted to be the first to let you know about Adair because you always used to understand. You would have understood if you'd been the _you_ that you were. I thought that if I explained to you about Maisie---- But what's the use!"

She rose from her chair and stood leaning against the table, looking wilted and pathetic. When she spoke again the heat had gone out of her words and was replaced by an appealing tenderness. "Don't you see what it is--why it is that I don't condemn? I'm so sorry for them--so sorry for you, for myself, for everybody. It hurts me here, Tabs." She laid her hand against her breast. "We all want what we've spent in the lost years. We want it so impatiently. We can't get it; but we want it at once--_now_. The things one wants are always in the past or the future, so one cheats to get them _now_."

He hadn't the remotest idea what she was trying to tell him. She was stirred by some deep emotion--some overwhelming loneliness. For a moment it crossed his mind that she also was tempted--fascinated by some lurement of dishonor kindred to Adair's. He put the thought from him as preposterous and disloyal. Yet it recurred. Ever since they had met she had been talking curiously--talking about having given away bits of herself to people who were hungry, little bits of herself in wrong directions. She had coupled her own case with this unspeakable Maisie's.

What was her problem?

She stood there with her head bowed, like a child self-accused of wrong-doing, with all the flaunting joy of spring tapping against the window on which she had turned her back. Then it dawned on him why she was standing; he was between the door of escape and herself. He stepped aside. As she moved eagerly forward, he caught her by the points of her elbows and arrested her going. The wild violet eyes fluttered up to his fearfully and fell as he towered over her.

"My very dearest!" He spoke gently in a voice from which all pa.s.sion had been purged. "Don't blame me if I simply can't understand. Though I never become any more to you than I am now, I shall always be your comrade, believing in you and loving you. Remember that."

When he released her she fled from him, leaving him alone in the shabby room.

VII

When he found her, she was talking to the girl-soldier in the yard of the inn. "But do you think that you can manage it, Prentys? It'll be all right in the open country, but I'm not sure that I want to risk it in the London traffic. We're merely joy-riding and, if anything happened to the car when you weren't on military duty----"

"I don't see that we've got much choice, miss," the girl answered. "The General's orders to me were explicit, and you know what he is: obedience and no explanations. We've barely time to do it."

Their backs were towards the inn. Tabs strolled up and made a pretense of inspecting the new tire.

"Anything I can do?" he asked casually.

It was Prentys who answered him. "I sprained my left wrist, sir, back there along the road." She held it out to him painfully as proof. It was all bound up and puffy. "It isn't very much use, sir; so I've only one hand and I don't know whether I'll be able----"

Terry interrupted and took up the running. "I thought that the car was ours for the day. Prentys has just told me that General Braithwaite ordered her to pick him up at the War Office this afternoon at three-thirty. Now that she's sprained her wrist, she'll have to drive so carefully that there's scarcely time to do it."

Tabs couldn't help smiling at the pompous importance of little people in this newly enfranchised world. It was only yesterday that for him also the foibles of Generals had been sacred. Generals had been G.o.ds whose tantrums and mental rheumatics had thrown whole armies into a fume and fret. For him that day was ended, but it still existed for this slim girl-soldier. He was sorry for her.

"You needn't be upset," he said kindly. "I haven't renewed my license, but I can drive. No one's likely to interfere with me in an Army car.

Jump in and I'll get you there with a quarter of an hour in hand."

"But----"

It was Terry who had spoken. Her brows puckered with thoughtfulness, she was gazing far away into the green distance. He waited for her to amplify her objection. When she maintained silence, he prompted her. "If it's me and my bag that's the trouble, you don't need to worry. After I've driven you both to the War Office, I can fudge round for a taxi.

One can usually w.a.n.gle one in the neighborhood of Whitehall."

Before he had ended, he knew that his guess had missed fire. It wasn't his comfort that was disturbing her.