THE MIRACLE
I
Big Mary was sweeping the ward with a broom muffled in a white bag. In the breeze from the open windows, her blue calico wrapper ballooned about her and made ludicrous her frantic thrusts after the bits of fluff that formed eddies under the beds and danced in the spring air.
She finished her sweeping, and, with the joyous scraps captured in her dust-pan, stood in the doorway, critically surveying the ward. It was brilliantly clean and festive; on either side a row of beds, fresh white for the day; on the centre table a vase of Easter lilies, and on the record-table near the door a potted hyacinth. The Nurse herself wore a bunch of violets tucked in her apron-band. One of the patients had seen the Junior Medical give them to her. The Eastern sun, shining across the beds, made below them, on the polished floor, black islands of shadow in a gleaming sea of light.
And scattered here and there, rocking in chairs or standing at windows, enjoying the Sunday respite from sewing or the bandage-machine, women, grotesque and distorted of figure, in attitudes of weariness and expectancy, with patient eyes awaited their crucifixion. Behind them, in the beds, a dozen perhaps who had come up from death and held the miracle in their arms.
The miracles were small and red, and inclined to feeble and ineffectual wrigglings. Fists were thrust in the air and brought down on smiling, pale mother faces. With tight-closed eyes and open mouths, each miracle squirmed and nuzzled until the mother would look with pleading eyes at the Nurse. And the Nurse would look severe and say:
"Good gracious, Annie Petowski, surely you don't want to feed that infant again! Do you want the child to have a dilated stomach?"
Fear of that horrible and mysterious condition, a dilated stomach, would restrain Annie Petowski or Jennie Goldstein or Maggie McNamara for a time. With the wisdom of the serpent, she would give the child her finger to suck—a finger so white, so clean, so soft in the last week that she was lost in admiration of it. And the child would take hold, all its small body set rigid in lines of desperate effort. Then it would relax suddenly, and spew out the finger, and the quiet hospital air would be rent with shrieks of lost illusion. Then Annie Petowski or Jennie Goldstein or Maggie McNamara would watch the Nurse with open hostility and defiance, and her rustling exit from the ward would be followed by swift cessation of cries, and, close to Annie or Jennie or Maggie's heart, there would be small ecstatic gurglings—and peace.
In her small domain the Nurse was queen. From her throne at the record-table, she issued proclamations of baths and fine combs, of clean bedding and trimmed nails, of tea and toast, of regular hours for the babies. From this throne, also, she directed periodic searches of the bedside stands, unearthing scraps of old toast, decaying fruit, candy, and an occasional cigarette. From the throne, too, she sent daily a blue-wrappered and pig-tailed brigade to the kitchen, armed with knives, to attack the dinner potatoes.
But on this Easter morning, the queen looked tired and worn. Her crown, a starched white cap, had slipped back on her head, and her blue-and-white dress was stained and spotted. Even her fresh apron and sleevelets did not quite conceal the damage. She had come in for a moment at the breakfast hour, and asked the Swede, Ellen Ollman, to serve the breakfast for her; and at half past eight she had appeared again for a moment, and had turned down one of the beds and put hot-water bottles in it.
The ward ate little breakfast. It was always nervous when a case was "on." Excursions down the corridor by one or another of the blue-wrappered brigade brought back bits of news:
"The doctor is smoking a cigarette in the hall;" or, "Miss Jones, the day assistant, has gone in;" and then, with bated breath, "The doctor with the red mustache has come"—by which it was known that things were going badly, the staff man having been summoned.
Suggestions of Easter began to appear even in this isolated ward, denied to all visitors except an occasional husband, who was usually regarded with a mixture of contempt and scepticism by the other women. But now the lilies came, and after them a lame young woman who played the organ in the chapel on Sundays, and who afterward went from ward to ward, singing little songs and accompanying herself on the mandolin she carried with her. The lame young woman seated herself in the throne-chair and sang an Easter anthem, and afterward limped around and placed a leaflet and a spray of lilies-of-the-valley on each bedside stand.
She was escorted around the ward by Elizabeth Miller, known as "Liz" in Our Alley, and rechristened Elizabeth by the Nurse. Elizabeth always read the tracts. She had been there four times, and knew all the nurses and nearly all the doctors. "Liz" had been known, in a shortage of nurses, to be called into the mysterious room down the hall to assist; and on those occasions, in an all-enveloping white gown over her wrapper, with her hair under a cap, she outranked the queen herself in regalness and authority.
The lame mandolin-player stopped at the foot of the empty bed. "Shall I put one here?" she asked, fingering a tract.
Liz meditated majestically.
"Well, I guess I would," she said. "Not that it'll do any good."
"Why?"
Liz jerked her head toward the corridor.
"She's not getting on very well," she said; "and, even if she gets through, she won't read the tract. She held her fingers in her ears last Sunday while the Bible-reader was here. She's young. Says she hopes she and the kid'll both die."
The mandolin-player was not unversed in the psychology of the ward.
"Then she—isn't married?" she asked, and because she was young, she flushed painfully.
Liz stared at her, and a faint light of amusement dawned in her eyes.
"Well, no," she admitted; "I guess that's what's worrying her. She's a fool, she is. She can put the kid in a home. That's what I do. Suppose she married the fellow that got her into trouble? Wouldn't he be always throwing it up to her?"
The mandolin-player looked at Liz, puzzled at this new philosophy of life.
"Have—have you a baby here?" she asked timidly.
"Have I!" said Liz, and, wheeling, led the way to her bed. She turned the blanket down with a practised hand, revealing a tiny red atom, so like the others that only mother love could have distinguished it.
"This is mine," she said airily. "Funny little mutt, isn't he?"
The mandolin-player gazed diffidently at the child.
"He—he's very little," she said.
"Little!" said Liz. "He holds the record here for the last six months—eleven pounds three ounces in his skin, when he arrived. The little devil!"
She put the blanket tenderly back over the little devil's sleeping form. The mandolin-player cast about desperately for the right thing to say.
"Does—does he look like his father?" she asked timidly. But apparently Liz did not hear. She had moved down the ward. The mandolin-player heard only a snicker from Annie Petowski's bed, and, vaguely uncomfortable, she moved toward the door.
Liz was turning down the cover of the empty bed, and the Nurse, with tired but shining eyes, was wheeling in the operating table.
The mandolin-player stepped aside to let the table pass. From the blankets she had a glimpse of a young face, bloodless and wan—of hurt, defiant blue eyes. She had never before seen life so naked, so relentless. She shrank back against the wall, a little sick. Then she gathered up her tracts and her mandolin, and limped down the hall.
The door of the mysterious room was open, and from it came a shrill, high wail, a rising and falling note of distress—the voice of a new soul in protest. She went past with averted face.
Back in the ward Liz leaned over the table and, picking the girl up bodily, deposited her tenderly in the warm bed. Then she stood back and smiled down at her, with her hands on her hips.
"Well," she said kindly, "it's over, and here you are! But it's no picnic, is it?"
The girl on the bed turned her head away. The coarsening of her features in the last month or two had changed to an almost bloodless refinement. With her bright hair, she looked as if she had been through the furnace of pain and had come out pure gold. But her eyes were hard.
"Go away," she said petulantly.
Liz leaned down and pulled the blanket over her shoulders.
"You sleep now," she said soothingly. "When you wake up you can have a cup of tea."
The girl threw the cover off and looked up despairingly into Liz's face.
"I don't want to sleep," she said. "My God, Liz, it's going to live and so am I!"
II
Now, the Nurse had been up all night, and at noon, after she had oiled the new baby and washed out his eyes and given him a teaspoonful of warm water, she placed Liz in charge of the ward, and went to her room to put on a fresh uniform. The first thing she did, when she got there, was to go to the mirror, with the picture of her mother tucked in its frame, and survey herself. When she saw her cap and the untidiness of her hair and her white collar all spotted, she frowned.
Then she took the violets out of her belt and put them carefully in a glass of water, and feeling rather silly, she leaned over and kissed them. After that she felt better.
She bathed her face in hot water and then in cold, which brought her colour back, and she put on everything fresh, so that she rustled with each step, which is proper for trained nurses; and finally she tucked the violets back where they belonged, and put on a new cap, which is also proper for trained nurses on gala occasions.
If she had not gone back to the mirror to see that the general effect was as crisp as it should be, things would have been different for Liz, and for the new mother back in the ward. But she did go back; and there, lying on the floor in front of the bureau, all folded together, was a piece of white paper exactly as if it has been tucked in her belt with the violets.
She opened it rather shakily, and it was a leaf from the ward order-book, for at the top it said:
Annie Petowski—may sit up for one hour.
And below that:
Goldstein baby—bran baths.
And below that:
I love you. E. J.
"E. J." was the Junior Medical.
So the Nurse went back to the ward, and sat down, palpitating, in the throne-chair by the table, and spread her crisp skirts, and found where the page had been torn out of the order-book.
And as the smiles of sovereigns are hailed with delight by their courts, so the ward brightened until it seemed to gleam that Easter afternoon. And a sort of miracle happened: none of the babies had colic, and the mothers mostly slept. Also, one of the ladies of the House Committee looked in at the door and said:
"How beautiful you are here, and how peaceful! Your ward is always a sort of benediction."
The lady of the House Committee looked across and saw the new mother, with the sunshine on her yellow braids, and her face refined from the furnace of pain.
"What a sweet young mother!" she said, and rustled out, leaving an odor of peau d'Espagne.
The girl lay much as Liz had left her. Except her eyes, there was nothing in her face to show that despair had given place to wild mutiny. But Liz knew; Liz had gone through it all when "the first one" came; and so, from the end of the ward, she rocked and watched.
The odor of peau d'Espagne was still in the air, eclipsing the Easter lilies, when Liz got up and sauntered down to the girl's bed.
"How are you now, dearie?" she asked, and, reaching under the blankets, brought out the tiny pearl-handled knife with which the girl had been wont to clean her finger-nails. The girl eyed her savagely, but said nothing; nor did she resist when Liz brought out her hands and examined the wrists. The left had a small cut on it.
"Now listen to me," said Liz. "None of that, do you hear? You ain't the only one that's laid here and wanted to end it all. And what happened? Inside of a month they're well and strong again, and they put the kid somewhere, and the folks that know what's happened get used to it, and the ones that don't know don't need to know. Don't be a fool!"
She carried the knife off, but the girl made no protest. There were other ways.
The Nurse was very tired, for she had been up almost all night. She sat at the record-table with her Bible open, and, in the intervals of taking temperatures, she read it. But mostly she read about Annie Petowski being allowed to sit up, and the Goldstein baby having bran baths, and the other thing written below!
At two o'clock came the Junior Medical, in a frock-coat and grey trousers. He expected to sing "The Palms" at the Easter service downstairs in the chapel that afternoon, and, according to precedent, the one who sings "The Palms" on Easter in the chapel must always wear a frock-coat.
Very conscious, because all the ward was staring at his gorgeousness, he went over to the bed where the new mother lay. Then he came back and stood by the table, looking at a record.
"Have you taken her temperature?" he said, businesslike and erect.
"Ninety-eight."
"Her pulse is strong?"
"Yes; she's resting quietly."
"Good.—And—did you get my note?"
This, much as if he had said, "Did you find my scarf-pin?" or anything merely casual; for Liz was hovering near.
"Yes." The nurse's red lips were trembling, but she smiled up at him. Liz came nearer. She was only wishing him Godspeed with his wooing, but it made him uncomfortable.
"Watch her closely," he said, "she's pretty weak and despondent." And he looked at Liz.
"Elizabeth," said the Nurse, "won't you sit by Claribel and fan her?"
Claribel was the new mother. Claribel is, of course, no name for a mother, but she had been named when she was very small.
Liz went away and sat by the girl's bed, and said a little prayer to the effect that they were both so damned good to everybody, she hoped they'd hit it off. But perhaps the prayer of the wicked availeth nothing.
"You know I meant that," he said, from behind a record. "I—I love you with all my heart—and if only you——"
The nurse shook down a thermometer and examined it closely. "I love you, too!" she said. And, walking shakily to one of the beds, she put the thermometer upside down in Maggie McNamara's mouth.
The Junior Medical went away with his shoulders erect in his frock-coat, and his heavy brown hair, which would never part properly and had to be persuaded with brilliantine, bristling with happiness.
And the Nurse-Queen, looking over her kingdom for somebody to lavish her new joy on, saw Claribel lying in bed, looking at the ceiling and reading there all the tragedy of her broken life, all her despair.
So she rustled out to the baby-room, where the new baby had never batted an eye since her bath and was lying on her back with both fists clenched on her breast, and she did something that no trained nurse is ever supposed to do.
She lifted the baby, asleep and all, and carried her to her mother.
But Claribel's face only darkened when she saw her.
"Take the brat away," she said, and went on reading tragedies on the ceiling.
Liz came and proffered her the little mite with every art she knew. She showed her the wrinkled bits of feet, the tiny, ridiculous hands, and how long the hair grew on the back of her head. But when Liz put the baby on her arm, she shuddered and turned her head away. So finally Liz took it back to the other room, and left it there, still sleeping.
The fine edge of the Nurse's joy was dulled. It is a characteristic of great happiness to wish all to be well with the world; and here before her was dry-eyed despair. It was Liz who finally decided her.
"I guess I'll sit up with her to-night," she said, approaching the table with the peculiar gait engendered of heel-less hospital carpet-slippers and Mother Hubbard wrappers. "I don't like the way she watches the ceiling."
"What do you mean, Elizabeth?" asked the Nurse.
"Time I had the twins—that's before your time," said Liz—"we had one like that. She went out the window head first the night after the baby came, and took the kid with her."
The Nurse rose with quick decision.
"We must watch her," she said. "Perhaps if I could find—I think I'll go to the telephone. Watch the ward carefully, Elizabeth, and if Annie Petowski tries to feed her baby before three o'clock, take it from her. The child's stuffed like a sausage every time I'm out for five minutes."
Nurses know many strange things: they know how to rub an aching back until the ache is changed to a restful thrill, and how to change the bedding and the patient's night-dress without rolling the patient over more than once, which is a high and desirable form of knowledge. But also they get to know many strange people; their clean starchiness has a way of rubbing up against the filth of the world and coming away unsoiled. And so the Nurse went downstairs to the telephone, leaving Liz to watch for nefarious feeding.
The Nurse called up Rose Davis; and Rosie, who was lying in bed with the Sunday papers scattered around her and a cigarette in her manicured fingers, reached out with a yawn and, taking the telephone, rested it on her laced and ribboned bosom.
"Yes," she said indolently.
The nurse told her who she was, and Rosie's voice took on a warmer tinge.
"Oh, yes," she said. "How are you?... Claribel? Yes; what about her?... What!"
"Yes," said the Nurse. "A girl—seven pounds."
"My Gawd! Well, what do you think of that! Excuse me a moment; my cigarette's set fire to the sheet. All right—go ahead."
"She's taking it pretty hard, and I—I thought you might help her. She—she——"
"How much do you want?" said Rose, a trifle coldly. She turned in the bed and eyed the black leather bag on the stand at her elbow. "Twenty enough?"
"I don't think it's money," said the Nurse, "although she needs that too; she hasn't any clothes for the baby. But—she's awfully despondent—almost desperate. Have you any idea who the child's father is?"
Rosie considered, lighting a new cigarette with one hand and balancing the telephone with the other.
"She left me a year ago," she said. "Oh, yes; I know now. What time is it?"
"Two o'clock."
"I'll tell you what I'll do," said Rosie. "I'll get the fellow on the wire and see what he's willing to do. Maybe he'll give her a dollar or two a week."
"Do you think you could bring him to see her?"
"Say, what do you think I am—a missionary?" The Nurse was wise, so she kept silent. "Well, I'll tell you what I will do. If I can bring him, I will. How's that yellow-haired she-devil you've got over there? I've got that fixed all right. She pulled a razor on me first—I've got witnesses. Well, if I can get Al, I'll do it. So long."
It did not occur to the Nurse to deprecate having used an evil medium toward a righteous end. She took life much as she found it. And so she tiptoed past the chapel again, where a faint odour of peau d'Espagne came stealing out into the hall, and where the children from the children's ward, in roller-chairs and on crutches, were singing with all their shrill young voices, earnest eyes uplifted.
The white Easter lilies on the altar sent their fragrance out over the gathering, over the nurses, young and placid, over the hopeless and the hopeful, over the faces where death had passed and left its inevitable stamp, over bodies freshly risen on this Easter Sunday to new hope and new life—over the Junior Medical, waiting with the manuscript of "The Palms" rolled in his hand and his heart singing a hymn of happiness.
The Nurse went up to her ward, and put a screen around Claribel, and, with all her woman's art, tidied the immaculate white bed and loosened the uncompromising yellow braids, so that the soft hair fell across Claribel's bloodless forehead and softened the defiance in her blue eyes. She brought the pink hyacinth in its pot, too, and placed it on the bedside table. Then she stood off and looked at her work. It was good.
Claribel submitted weakly. She had stopped staring at the wall, and had taken to watching the open window opposite with strange intentness. Only when the Nurse gave a final pat to the bedspread she spoke.
"Was it a boy—or a girl?" she asked.
"Girl," said the nurse briskly. "A little beauty, perfect in every way."
"A girl—to grow up and go through this hell!" she muttered, and her eyes wandered back to the window.
But the Nurse was wise with the accumulated wisdom of a sex that has had to match strength with wile for ages, and she was not yet ready. She went into the little room where eleven miracles lay in eleven cribs, and, although they all looked exactly alike, she selected Claribel's without hesitation, and carried it to the mysterious room down the hall—which was no longer a torture-chamber, but a resplendently white place, all glass and tile and sunlight, and where she did certain things that are not prescribed in the hospital rules.
First of all, she opened a cupboard and took out a baby dress of lace and insertion,—and everybody knows that such a dress is used only when a hospital infant is baptised,—and she clothed Claribel's baby in linen and fine raiment, and because they are very, very red when they are so new, she dusted it with a bit of talcum—to break the shock, as you may say. It was very probable that Al had never seen so new a baby, and it was useless to spoil the joy of parenthood unnecessarily. For it really was a fine child, and eventually it would be white and beautiful.
The baby smelled of violet, for the christening-robe was kept in a sachet.
Finally she gave it another teaspoonful of warm water and put it back in its crib. And then she rustled starchily back to the throne-chair by the record-table, and opened her Bible at the place where it said that Annie Petowski might sit up, and the Goldstein baby—bran baths, and the other thing written just below.
III
The music poured up the well of the staircase; softened by distance, the shrill childish sopranos and the throaty basses of the medical staff merged into a rising and falling harmony of exquisite beauty.
Liz sat on the top step of the stairs, with her baby in her arms; and, as the song went on, Liz's eyes fell to her child and stayed there.
At three o'clock the elevator-man brought Rosie Davis along the hall—Rosie, whose costume betrayed haste, and whose figure, under a gaudy motor-coat, gave more than a suggestion of being unsupported and wrapper-clad. She carried a clinking silver chatelaine, however, and at the door she opened it and took out a quarter, extending it with a regal gesture to the elevator-man.
"Here, old sport," she said, "go and blow yourself to a drink. It's Easter."
Such munificence appalled the ward.
Rosie was not alone. Behind her, uncomfortable and sullen, was Al. The ward, turning from the episode of the quarter, fixed on him curious and hostile eyes; and Al, glancing around the ward from the doorway, felt their hostility, and plucked Rosie's arm.
"Gee, Rose, I'm not going in there," he said. But Rosie pulled him in and presented him to the Nurse.
Behind the screen, Claribel, shut off from her view of the open window, had taken to staring at the ceiling again.
When the singing came up the staircase from the chapel, she had moaned and put her fingers in her ears.
"Well, I found him," said Rosie cheerfully. "Had the deuce of a time locating him." And the Nurse, apprising in one glance his stocky figure and heavy shoulders, his ill-at-ease arrogance, his weak, and just now sullen but not bad-tempered face, smiled at him.
"We have a little girl here who will be glad to see you," she said, and took him to the screen. "Just five minutes, and you must do the talking."
Al hesitated between the visible antagonism of the ward and the mystery of the white screen. A vision of Claribel as he had seen her last, swollen with grief and despair, distorted of figure and accusing of voice, held him back. A faint titter of derision went through the room. He turned on Rosie's comfortable back a look of black hate and fury. Then the Nurse gave him a gentle shove, and he was looking at Claribel—a white, Madonna-faced Claribel, lying now with closed eyes, her long lashes sweeping her cheek.
The girl did not open her eyes at his entrance. He put his hat awkwardly on the foot of the bed, and, tiptoeing around, sat on the edge of the stiff chair.
"Well, how are you, kid?" he asked, with affected ease.
She opened her eyes and stared at him. Then she made a little clutch at her throat, as if she were smothering.
"How did you—how did you know I was here?"
"Saw it in the paper, in the society column." She winced at that, and some fleeting sense of what was fitting came to his aid. "How are you?" he asked more gently. He had expected a flood of reproaches, and he was magnanimous in his relief.
"I've been pretty bad; I'm better."
"Oh, you'll be around soon, and going to dances again. The Maginnis Social Club's having a dance Saturday night in Mason's Hall."
The girl did not reply. She was wrestling with a problem that is as old as the ages, although she did not know it—why this tragedy of hers should not be his. She lay with her hands crossed quietly on her breast and one of the loosened yellow braids was near his hand. He picked it up and ran it through his fingers.
"Hasn't hurt your looks any," he said awkwardly. "You're looking pretty good."
With a jerk of her head she pulled the braid out of his fingers.
"Don't," she said and fell to staring at the ceiling, where she had written her problem.
"How's the—how's the kid?"—after a moment.
"I don't know—or care."
There was nothing strange to Al in this frame of mind. Neither did he know or care.
"What are you goin' to do with it?"
"Kill it!"
Al considered this a moment. Things were bad enough now, without Claribel murdering the child and making things worse.
"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 the 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 with 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.
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 very 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.
"Look here," she said, "you look half sick, or worried, or something. Stop telling me to take care of myself, and look after yourself a little better."
"I'm all right," he replied. Then soon after: "Everything's strange. That's the trouble," he confessed. "It's only in little things that don't matter, but a fellow feels such a duffer."
On the last night he took her to dinner—a small French restaurant in a back street in Soho. He had heard about it somewhere. Edith classed it as soon as she entered. It was too retiring, too demure. Its very location was clandestine.
But he never knew. He was divided that night between joy at getting to his regiment and grief at leaving her. Rather self-engrossed, she thought.
They had a table by an open grate fire, with a screen "to shut off the draft," the waiter said. It gave the modest meal a delightfully homey air, their isolation and the bright coal fire. For the first time they learned the joys of mussels boiled in milk, of French soufflé and other things.
At the end of the evening he took her back to her cheap hotel in a taxicab. She expected him to kiss her. Her experience of taxicabs had been like that. But he did not. He said very little on the way home, but sat well back and eyed her wistful eyes. She chattered to cover his silence—of rehearsals, of—with reservations—of Lethway, of the anticipated London opening. She felt very sad herself. He had been a tie to America, and he had been much more than that. Though she did not realise it, he had had a profound effect on her. In trying to seem what he thought her she was becoming what he thought her. Her old reckless attitude toward life was gone, or was going.