Love Stories Part 34

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 n.o.body connected with it knew anything about human nature. He formulated a plan, compounded of liquor and real business ac.u.men, 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 pa.s.sed 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 d.o.g.g.i.ng 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. d.a.m.n 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.