Love Stories Part 35

At first he was jealous of Lethway. Then that pa.s.sed. 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 compa.s.sion.

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 sh.o.r.e 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 hoa.r.s.ely. 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 sw.a.n.king. One day at luncheon he drank a gla.s.s 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 m.u.f.fins.

"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 cla.s.sed 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 _souffle_ 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 att.i.tude toward life was gone, or was going.

The day before she had refused an invitation to a night club, and called herself a fool for doing it. But she had refused.

Not that he had performed miracles with her. She was still frankly a dweller on the neutral ground. But to that instinct that had kept her up to that time what she would have called "straight" had been added a new refinement. She was no longer the reckless and romping girl whose abandon had caught Lethway's eye.

She had gained a soul, perhaps, and lost a livelihood.