It, and Other Stories Part 37

"You are," he said, "wide awake. Take my word for it, and I hope you're having a good time."

The Chinaman poured something light and sparkling into her gla.s.s from a bottle dressed in a napkin. Misgivings returned to her. She had heard of girls being drugged.

"You don't have to drink it," said the young man. "I had some served because dinner doesn't look like dinner without champagne. Still, after the thoroughly unhappy day you've put in, I think a mouthful or two would do you good."

She lifted the gla.s.s of champagne, smiled, drank, and choked. He laughed at her merrily.

All through dinner he kept lighting cigarettes and throwing them away.

Between times he ate with great relish and heartiness.

Lila was in heaven. All her doubts and fears had vanished. She felt thoroughly at home, as if she had always been used to service and linen and silver and courtesy.

They had coffee, and then they strolled about in the moonlight, while the young man smoked a very long cigar.

He looked at his watch, and sighed. "Well, Miss," he said, "if we're to get you safe home to your mother!"

"I won't be a minute," she said.

"You know the way?"

She ran upstairs, and, having put on her hat, decided that it looked cheap and vulgar, and took it off again.

He wrapped her in a soft white polo-coat for the long run to New York.

She looked back at the lights of his house. Would she ever see them again, or smell the salt and the box and the roses?

By the time they had reached the Zoological Gardens at Fordham she had fallen blissfully asleep. He ran the car with considerate slowness, and looked at her very often. She waked as they crossed the river. Her eyes shrank from the piled serried buildings of Manhattan. The air was no longer clean and delicious to the lungs.

"Have I been asleep?"

"Yes."

"Oh," she cried, "how could I! How could I! I've missed some of it. And it never happened before, and it will never happen again."

"Not in the same way, perhaps," he said gravely. "But how do you know? I think you are one girl in ten million, and to you all things are possible."

"How many men in ten million are like you?" she asked.

"Men are all pretty much alike," he said. "They have good impulses and bad."

In the stark darkness between the outer and the inner door of the tenement in which she lived, there was an awkward, troubled silence. He wished very much to kiss her, but had made up his mind that he would not. She thought that he might, and had made up her mind that if he attempted to she would resist. She was not in the least afraid of him any more, but of herself.

He kissed her, and she did not resist.

"Good-night," he said, and then with a half-laugh, "Which is your bell?"

She found it and rang it. Presently there was a rusty click, and the inner door opened an inch or so. Neither of them spoke for a full minute. Then she, her face aflame in the darkness:

"When you came I was only a little fool who'd bought a pair of shoes that were too tight for her. I didn't _know_ anything. I'm wise now. I know that I'm dreaming, and that if I wake up before the dream is ended I shall die."

She tried to laugh gayly and could not.

"I've made things harder for you instead of easier," he said. "I'm terribly sorry. I meant well."

"Oh, it isn't that," she said. "Thank you a thousand thousand times. And good-night."

"Wait," he said. "Will you play with me again some time? How about Sat.u.r.day?"

"No," she said. "It wouldn't be fair--to me. Good-night."

She pa.s.sed through the inner door and up the narrow creaking stair to the dark tenement in which she lived; she could hear the restless breathing of her sleeping family.

"Oh, my G.o.d!" she thought, "if it weren't for _them_!"

As for the young man, having lighted a long cigar, he entered his car and drove off, muttering to himself:

"d.a.m.nation! Why does a girl like that _have_ a family!"

He never saw her again, nor was he ever haunted by the thought that he had perhaps spoiled her whole life as thoroughly as if he had taken advantage of her ignorance and her innocence.

BACK THERE IN THE GRa.s.s

It was spring in the South Seas when, for the first time, I went ash.o.r.e at Batengo, which is the Polynesian village, and the only one on the big gra.s.s island of the same name. There is a cable station just up the beach from the village, and a good-natured young chap named Graves had charge of it. He was an upstanding, clean-cut fellow, as the fact that he had been among the islands for three years without falling into any of their ways proved. The interior of the corrugated iron house in which he lived, for instance, was bachelor from A to Z. And if that wasn't a sufficient alibi, my pointer dog, Don, who dislikes anything Polynesian or Melanesian, took to him at once. And they established a romping friendship. He gave us lunch on the porch, and because he had not seen a white man for two months, or a liver-and-white dog for two years, he told us the entire story of his young life, with reminiscences of early childhood and plans for the future thrown in.

The future was very simple. There was a girl coming out to him from the States by the next steamer but one; the captain of that steamer would join them together in holy wedlock, and after that the Lord would provide.

"My dear fellow," he said, "you think I'm asking her to share a very lonely sort of life, but if you could imagine all the--the affection and gentleness, and thoughtfulness that I've got stored up to pour out at her feet for the rest of our lives, you wouldn't be a bit afraid for her happiness. If a man spends his whole time and imagination thinking up ways to make a girl happy and occupied, he can think up a whole lot....

I'd like ever so much to show her to you."

He led the way to his bedroom, and stood in silent rapture before a large photograph that leaned against the wall over his dressing-table.

She didn't look to me like the sort of girl a cable agent would happen to marry. She looked like a swell--the real thing--beautiful and simple and unaffected.

"Yes," he said, "isn't she?"

I hadn't spoken a word. Now I said:

"It's easy to see why you aren't lonely with that wonderful girl to look at. Is she really coming out by the next steamer but one? It's hard to believe because she's so much too good to be true."

"Yes," he said, "isn't she?"

"The usual cable agent," I said, "keeps from going mad by having a dog or a cat or some pet or other to talk to. But I can understand a photograph like this being all-sufficient to any man--even if he had never seen the original. Allow me to shake hands with you."

Then I got him away from the girl, because my time was short and I wanted to find out about some things that were important to _me_.

"You haven't asked me my business in these parts," I said, "but I'll tell you. I'm collecting gra.s.ses for the Bronx Botanical Garden."