Love Stories Part 32

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 b.u.t.t 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 cla.s.s. 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 n.o.body 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 the ma.s.s 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 superst.i.tion, 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 unb.u.t.toned 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 sw.a.n.king.

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 s.h.i.+fts 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.