Love Stories Part 39

"No actress is good. And dancers!"

"You don't know what you are talking about," he said roughly, and turned his back to her. It was almost insulting to have her a.s.sist him to his att.i.tude of contempt, and to prop him in it with pillows behind his back. Lying there he tried hard to remember that this woman belonged to his hereditary foes. He was succeeding in hating her when he felt her heavy hand on his head.

"Poor boy! Poor little one!" she said. And her voice was husky.

When at last he was moved from the hospital to the prison camp she pinned the sleeve of his ragged uniform across his chest and kissed him, to his great discomfiture. Then she went to the curtained corner that was her quarters and wept long and silently.

The prison camp was overcrowded. Early morning and late evening prisoners were lined up to be counted. There was a medley of languages--French, English, Arabic, Russian. The barracks were built round a muddy inclosure in which the men took what exercise they could.

One night a boy with a beautiful tenor voice sang Auld Lang Syne under the boy's window. He stood with his hand on the cuff of his empty sleeves and listened. And suddenly a great shame filled him, that with so many gone forever, with men dying every minute of every hour, back at the lines, he had been so obsessed with himself.

He was still bitter, but the bitterness was that he could not go back again and fight.

When he had been in the camp a month he helped two British officers to escape. One of them had snubbed him in London months before. He apologised before he left.

"You're a man, Hamilton," he said. "All you Canadians are men. I've some things to tell when I get home."

The boy could not go with them. There would be ca.n.a.ls to swim across, and there was his empty sleeve and weakness. He would never swim again, he thought. That night, as he looked at the empty beds of the men who had gone, he remembered his medals and smiled grimly.

He was learning to use his left hand. He wrote letters home with it for soldiers who could not write. He went into the prison hospital and wrote letters for those who would never go home. But he did not write to the girl.

He went back at last, when the hopelessly wounded were exchanged. To be branded "hopelessly wounded" was to him a stain, a stigma. It put him among the clutterers of the earth. It stranded him on the sh.o.r.e of life. Hopelessly wounded!

For, except what would never be whole, he was well again. True, confinement and poor food had kept him weak and white. His legs had a way of going shaky at nightfall. But once he knocked down an insolent Russian with his left hand, and began to feel his own man again. That the Russian was weak from starvation did not matter. The point to the boy was that he had made the attempt.

Providence has a curious way of letting two lives run along, each apparently independent of the other. Parallel lines they seem, hopeless of meeting. Converging lines really, destined, through long ages, by every deed that has been done to meet at a certain point and there fuse.

Edith had left Mabel, but not to go to Lethway. When nothing else remained that way was open. She no longer felt any horror--only a great distaste. But two weeks found her at her limit. She, who had rarely had more than just enough, now had nothing.

And no glory of sacrifice upheld her. She no longer believed that by removing the burden of her support she could save Mabel. It was clear that Mabel would not be saved. To go back and live on her, under the circ.u.mstances, was but a degree removed from the other thing that confronted her.

There is just a chance that, had she not known the boy, she would have killed herself. But again the curious change he had worked in her manifested itself. He thought suicide a wicked thing.

"I take it like this," he had said in his eager way: "life's a thing that's given us for some purpose. Maybe the purpose gets clouded--I'm afraid I'm an awful duffer at saying what I mean. But we've got to work it out, do you see? Or--or the whole scheme is upset."

It had seemed very clear then.

Then, on a day when the rare sun made even the rusty silk hats of clerks on tops of omnibuses to gleam, when the traffic glittered on the streets and the windows of silversmiths' shops shone painful to the eye, she met Lethway again.

The sun had made her reckless. Since the boy was gone life was wretchedness, but she clung to it. She had given up all hope of Cecil's return, and what she became mattered to no one else.

Perhaps, more than anything else, she craved companionship. In all her crowded young life she had never before been alone.

Companionship and kindness. She would have followed to heel, like a dog, for a kind word.

Then she met Lethway. They walked through the park. When he left her her once clear, careless glance had a suggestion of furtiveness in it.

That afternoon she packed her trunk and sent it to an address he had given her. In her packing she came across the stick of cold cream, still in the pocket of the middy blouse. She flung it, as hard as she could, across the room.

She paid her bill with money Lethway had given her. She had exactly a sixpence of her own. She found herself in Trafalgar Square late in the afternoon. The great enlisting posters there caught her eye, filled her with bitterness.

"Your king and your country need you," she read. She had needed the boy, too, but this vast and impersonal thing, his mother country, had taken him from her--taken him and lost him. She wanted to stand by the poster and cry to the pa.s.sing women to hold their men back.

As she now knew she hated Lethway, she hated England.

She wandered on. Near Charing Cross she spent the sixpence for a bunch of lilies of the valley, because he had said once that she was like them. Then she was for throwing them in the street, remembering the thing she would soon be.

"For the wounded soldiers," said the flower girl. When she comprehended that, she made her way into the station. There was a great crowd, but something in her face made the crowd draw back and let her through. They nudged each other as she pa.s.sed.

"Looking for some one, poor child!" said a girl and, following her, thrust the flowers she too carried into Edith's hand. She put them with the others, rather dazed.

To Cecil the journey had been a series of tragedies. Not his own.

There were two hundred of them, officers and men, on the boat across the Channel. Blind, maimed, paralysed, in motley garments, they were hilariously happy. Every throb of the turbine engines was a thrust toward home. They sang, they cheered.

Now and then some one would shout: "Are we downhearted?" And crutches and canes would come down on the deck to the unanimous shout: "No!"

Folkestone had been trying, with its parade of cheerfulness, with kindly women on the platform serving tea and buns. In the railway coach to London, where the officers sat, a talking machine played steadily, and there were ma.s.ses of flowers, violets and lilies of the valley. At Charing Cross was a great ma.s.s of people, and as they slowly disembarked he saw that many were crying. He was rather surprised. He had known London as a cold and unemotional place. It had treated him as an alien, had snubbed and ignored him.

He had been prepared to ask nothing of London, and it lay at his feet in tears.

Then he saw Edith.

Perhaps, when in the fullness of years the boy goes over to the life he so firmly believes awaits him, the one thing he will carry with him through the open door will be the look in her eyes when she saw him. Too precious a thing to lose, surely, even then. Such things make heaven.

"What did I tell you?" cried the girl who had given Edith her flowers. "She has found him. See, he has lost his arm. Look out--catch him!"

But he did not faint. He went even whiter, and looking at Edith he touched his empty sleeve.

"As if that would make any difference to her!" said the girl, who was in black. "Look at her face! She's got him."

Neither Edith nor the boy could speak. He was afraid of unmanly tears. His dignity was very dear to him. And the tragedy of his empty sleeve had her by the throat. So they went out together and the crowd opened to let them by.

At nine o'clock that night Lethway stormed through the stage entrance of the theatre and knocked viciously at the door of Mabel's dressing room. Receiving no attention, he opened the door and went in.

The room was full of flowers, and Mabel, ready to go on, was having her pink toes rouged for her barefoot dance.

"You've got a nerve!" she said coolly.

"Where's Edith?"

"I don't know and I don't care. She ran away, when I was stinting myself to keep her. I'm done. Now you go out and close that door, and when you want to enter a lady's dressing room, knock."

He looked at her with blazing hatred.

"Right-o!" was all he said. And he turned and left her to her flowers.