Love Stories Part 36

When they reached the hotel he got out and went in with her. The hall porter was watching and she held out her hand. But he shook his head.

"If I touched your hand," he said, "I would have to take you in my arms. Good-bye, dear."

"Good-bye," she said. There were tears in her eyes. It was through a mist that she saw him, as the elevator went up, standing at salute, his eyes following her until she disappeared from sight.

IV

Things were going wrong with Lethway. The management was ragging him, for one thing.

"Give the girl time," he said almost viciously, at the end of a particularly bad rehearsal. "She's had a long voyage and she's tired. Besides," he added, "these acts never do go at rehearsal.

Give me a good house at the opening and she'll show you what she can do."

But in his soul he was worried. There was a change in Edith O'Hara.

Even her voice had altered. It was not only her manner to him. That was marked enough, but he only shrugged his shoulders over it. Time enough for that when the production was on.

He had engaged a hoyden, and she was by way of becoming a lady.

During the first week or so he had hoped that it was only the strangeness of her surroundings. He had been shrewd enough to lay some of it, however, to Cecil's influence.

"When your soldier boy gets out of the way," he sneered one day in the wings, "perhaps you'll get down to earth and put some life in your work."

But to his dismay she grew steadily worse. Her dancing was delicate, accurate, even graceful, but the thing the British public likes to think typically American, a sort of breezy swagger, was gone. To bill her in her present state as the Madcap American would be sheer folly.

Ten days before the opening he cabled for another girl to take her place.

He did not tell her. Better to let her work on, he decided. A German submarine might sink the ship on which the other girl was coming, and then where would they be?

Up to the last, however, he had hopes of Edith. Not that he cared to save her. But he hated to acknowledge a failure. He disliked to disavow his own judgment.

He made a final effort with her, took her one day to luncheon at Simpson's, and in one of the pewlike compartments, over mutton and caper sauce, he tried to "talk a little life into her."

"What the devil has come over you?" he demanded savagely. "You were larky enough over in New York. There are any number of girls in London who can do what you are doing now, and do it better."

"I'm doing just what I did in New York."

"The h.e.l.l you are! I could do what you're doing with a jointed doll and some wires. Now see here, Edith," he said, "either you put some go into the thing, or you go. That's flat."

Her eyes filled.

"I--maybe I'm worried," she said. "Ever since I found out that I've signed up, with no arrangement about sending me back, it's been on my mind."

"Don't you worry about that."

"But if they put some one on in my place?"

"You needn't worry about that either. I'll look after you. You know that. If I hadn't been crazy about you I'd have let you go a week ago. You know that too."

She knew the tone, knew instantly where she stood. Knew, too, that she would not play the first night in London. She went rather white, but she faced him coolly.

"Don't look like that," he said. "I'm only telling you that if you need a friend I'll be there."

It was two days before the opening, however, when the blow fell. She had not been sleeping, partly from anxiety about herself, partly about the boy. Every paper she picked up was full of the horrors of war. There were columns filled with the names of those who had fallen. Somehow even his uniform had never closely connected the boy with death in her mind. He seemed so young.

She had had a feeling that his very youth would keep him from danger. War to her was a faintly conceived struggle between men, and he was a boy.

But here were boys who had died, boys at nineteen. And the lists of missing startled her. One morning she read in the personal column a query, asking if any one could give the details of the death of a young subaltern. She cried over that. In all her care-free life never before had she wept over the griefs of others.

Cecil had sent her his photograph taken in his uniform. Because he had had it taken to give her he had gazed directly into the eye of the camera. When she looked at it it returned her glance. She took to looking at it a great deal.

Two days before the opening she turned from a dispirited rehearsal to see Mabel standing in the wings. Then she knew. The end had come.

Mabel was jaunty, but rather uneasy.

"You poor dear!" she said, when Edith went to her. "What on earth's happened? The cable only said--honest, dearie, I feel like a dog!"

"They don't like me. That's all," she replied wearily, and picked up her hat and jacket from a chair. But Mabel was curious.

Uncomfortable, too, as she had said. She slipped an arm round Edith's waist.

"Say the word and I'll throw them down," she cried. "It looks like dirty work to me. And you're thin. Honest, dearie, I mean it."

Her loyalty soothed the girl's sore spirit.

"I don't know what's come over me," she said. "I've tried hard enough. But I'm always tired. I--I think it's being so close to the war."

Mabel stared at her. There was a war. She knew that. The theatrical news was being crowded to a back page to make s.p.a.ce for disagreeable diagrams and strange, throaty names.

"I know. It's fierce, isn't it?" she said.

Edith took her home, and they talked far into the night. She had slipped Cecil's picture into the wardrobe before she turned on the light. Then she explained the situation.

"It's pep they want, is it?" said Mabel at last. "Well, believe me, honey, I'll give it to them. And as long as I've got a cent it's yours."

They slept together in Edith's narrow bed, two slim young figures delicately flushed with sleep. As pathetic, had they known it, as those other sleepers in their untidy billets across the channel.

Almost as hopeless too. Dwellers in the neutral ground.

V

Now war, after all, is to each fighting man an affair of small numbers, an affair of the men to his right and his left, of the A.M.S.C. in the rear and of a handful of men across. On his days of rest the horizon is somewhat expanded. It becomes then a thing of crowded and muddy village streets, of food and drink and tobacco and a place to sleep.

Always, of course, it is a thing of noises.

This is not a narrative of war. It matters very little, for instance, how Cecil's regiment left Salisbury and went to Soissons, in France. What really matters is that at last the Canadian-made motor lorries moved up their equipment, and that, after digging practice trenches in the yellow clay of old battlefields, they were moved up to the front.

Once there, there seemed to be a great deal of time. It was the lull before Neuve Chapelle. Cecil's spirit grew heavy with waiting. Once, back on rest at his billet, he took a long walk over the half-frozen side roads and came without warning on a main artery. Three traction engines were taking to the front the first of the great British guns, so long awaited. He took the news back to his mess. The general verdict was that there would be something doing now.

Cecil wrote a letter to Edith that day. He had written before, of course, but this was different. He wrote first to his mother, just in case anything happened, a long, boyish letter with a misspelled word here and there. He said he was very happy and very comfortable, and that if he did get his he wanted her to know that it was all perfectly cheerful and not anything like the war correspondents said it was. He'd had a bully time all his life, thanks to her. He hadn't let her know often enough how he felt about her, and she knew he was a dub at writing. There were a great many things worse than "going out" in a good fight. "It isn't at all as if you could see the blooming thing coming," he wrote. "You never know it's after you until you've got it, and then you don't."

The letter was not to be sent unless he was killed. So he put in a few anecdotes to let her know exactly how happy and contented he was. Then he dropped the whole thing in the ten inches of mud and water he was standing in, and had to copy it all over.