Love Stories Part 37

To Edith he wrote a different sort of letter. He told her that he loved her. "It's almost more adoration than love," he wrote, while two men next to him were roaring over a filthy story. "I mean by that, that I feel every hour of every day how far above me you are.

It's like one of these _fusees_ the Germans are always throwing up over us at night. It's perfectly dark, and then something bright and clear and like a star, only nearer, is overhead. Everything looks different while it floats there. And so, my dear, my dear, everything has been different to me since I knew you."

Rather boyish, all of it, but terribly earnest. He said he had wanted to ask her to marry him, but that the way he felt about it, a fellow had no right to ask a girl such a thing when he was going to a war. If he came back he would ask her. And he would love her all his life.

The next day, at dawn, he went out with eighty men to an outpost that had been an abandoned farm. It was rather a forlorn hope. They had one machine gun. At nine o'clock the enemy opened fire on them and followed it by an attack. The major in charge went down early.

At two Cecil was standing in the loft of the farmhouse, firing with a revolver on men who beneath him, outside, were placing dynamite under a corner of the building.

To add to the general hopelessness, their own artillery, believing them all dead, opened fire on the building. They moved their wounded to the cellar and kept on fighting.

At eight o'clock that night Cecil's right arm was hanging helpless, and the building was burning merrily. There were five of them left.

They fixed bayonets and charged the open door.

When the boy opened his eyes he was lying in six inches of manure in a box car. One of his men was standing over him, keeping him from being trampled on. There was no air and no water. The ammonia fumes from the manure were stifling.

The car lurched and jolted along. Cecil opened his eyes now and then, and at first he begged for water. When he found there was none he lay still. The men hammered on the door and called for air. They made frantic, useless rushes at the closed and barred door. Except Cecil, all were standing. They were herded like cattle, and there was no room to lie or sit.

He lay there, drugged by weakness. He felt quite sure that he was dying, and death was not so bad. He voiced this feebly to the man who stood over him.

"It's not so bad," he said.

"The h.e.l.l it's not!" said the man.

For the time Edith was effaced from his mind. He remembered the wounded men left in the cellar with the building burning over them.

That, and days at home, long before the war.

Once he said "Mother." The soldier who was now standing astride of him, the better to keep off the crowding men, thought he was asking for water again.

Thirty hours of that, and then air and a little water. Not enough water. Not all the water in all the cool streams of the earth would have slaked the thirst of his wound.

The boy was impa.s.sive. He was living in the past. One day he recited at great length the story of his medals. No one listened.

And all the time his right arm lay or hung, as he was p.r.o.ne or erect, a strange right arm that did not belong to him. It did not even swell. When he touched it the fingers were cold and bluish. It felt like a dead hand.

Then, at the end of it all, was a bed, and a woman's voice, and quiet.

The woman was large and elderly, and her eyes were very kind. She stirred something in the boy that had been dead of pain.

"Edith!" he said.

VI

Mabel had made a hit. Unconscious imitator that she was, she stole Edith's former recklessness, and added to it something of her own dash and verve. Lethway, standing in the wings, knew she was not and never would be Edith. She was not fine enough. Edith at her best had frolicked. Mabel romped, was almost wanton. He cut out the string music at the final rehearsal. It did not fit.

On the opening night the bra.s.s notes of the orchestra blared and shrieked. Mabel's bare feet flew, her loose hair, cut to her ears and held only by a band over her forehead, kept time in ecstatic little jerks. When at last she pulled off the fillet and bowed to the applause, her thick short hair fell over her face as she jerked her head forward. They liked that. It savoured of the abandoned. She shook it back, and danced the encore without the fillet. With her scant chiffons whirling about her knees, her loose hair, her girlish body, she was the embodiment of young love, of its pa.s.sion, its fire.

Edith had been spring, palpitant with gladness.

Lethway, looking with tired eyes from the wings, knew that he had made a commercial success. But back of his sordid methods there was something of the soul of an artist. And this rebelled.

But he made a note to try flame-coloured chiffon for Mabel. Edith was to have danced in the pale greens of a water nymph.

On the night of her triumph Mabel returned late to Edith's room, where she was still quartered. She was moving the next day to a small apartment. With the generosity of her cla.s.s she had urged Edith to join her, and Edith had perforce consented.

"How did it go?" Edith asked from the bed.

"Pretty well," said Mabel. "Nothing unusual."

She turned up the light, and from her radiant reflection in the mirror Edith got the truth. She lay back with a dull, sickening weight round her heart. Not that Mabel had won, but that she herself had failed.

"You're awfully late."

"I went to supper. Wish you'd been along, dearie. Terribly swell club of some sort." Then her good resolution forgotten: "I made them sit up and take notice, all right. Two invitations for supper to-morrow night and more on the way. And when I saw I'd got the house going to-night, and remembered what I was being paid for it, it made me sick."

"It's better than nothing."

"Why don't you ask Lethway to take you on in the chorus? It would do until you get something else."

"I have asked him. He won't do it."

Mabel was still standing in front of the mirror. She threw her head forward so her short hair covered her face, and watched the effect carefully. Then she came over and sat on the bed.

"He's a dirty dog," she said.

The two girls looked at each other. They knew every move in the game of life, and Lethway's methods were familiar ones.

"What are you going to do about it?" Mabel demanded at last.

"Believe me, old dear, he's got a bad eye. Now listen here," she said with impulsive generosity. "I've got a scheme. I'll draw enough ahead to send you back. I'll do it to-morrow, while the drawing's good."

"And queer yourself at the start?" said Edith scornfully. "Talk sense, Mabel, I'm up against it, but don't you worry. I'll get something."

But she did not get anything. She was reduced in the next week to entire dependence on the other girl. And, even with such miracles of management as they had both learned, it was increasingly difficult to get along.

There was a new element too. Edith was incredulous at first, but at last she faced it. There was a change in Mabel. She was not less hospitable nor less generous. It was a matter of a point of view.

Success was going to her head. Her indignation at certain phases of life was changing to tolerance. She found Edith's rampant virtue a trifle wearing. She took to staying out very late, and coming in ready to meet Edith's protest with defiant gaiety. She bought clothes too.

"You'll have to pay for them sometime," Edith reminded her.

"I should worry. I've got to look like something if I'm going to go out at all."

Edith, who had never thought things out before, had long hours to think now. And the one thing that seemed clear and undeniable was that she must not drive Mabel into debt. Debt was the curse of most of the girls she knew. As long as they were on their own they could manage. It was the burden of unpaid bills, lightly contracted, that drove so many of them wrong.

That night, while Mabel was asleep, she got up and cautiously lighted the gas. Then she took the boy's photograph out of its hiding place and propped it on top of her trunk. For a long time she sat there, her chin in her hands, and looked at it.

It was the next day that she saw his name among the missing.