The Crimson Tide Part 87

She smiled, keeping her head and her courage high without apparent effort:

"It's another job for you," she said lightly. "Will you be kind enough to put this house on your list?"

"If you wish."

"Thank you, Jim, I do indeed. And the sooner you can sell it for me the better."

He said: "And the sooner you marry me the better, Palla."

At that she flushed crimson and made a quick gesture as though to check him; but he went on: "I heard what you said to those filthy swine to-night. It was the pluckiest, most splendid thing I ever heard and saw. And I have seen battles. Some. But I never before saw a woman take her life in her hands and go all alone into a cage of the same dangerous, rabid beasts that had slain a friend of hers within the week, and find courage to face them and tell them they _were_ beasts!--and more than that!--find courage to confess her own mistakes--humble herself--acknowledge what she had abjured--bear witness to the G.o.d whom once she believed abandoned her!"

She strove to open her lips in protest--lifted her disconcerted eyes to his--shrank away a little as his hand fell over hers.

"I've never faltered," he said. "It d.a.m.ned near killed me.... But I'd have gone on loving you, Palla, all my life. There never could have been anybody except you. There was never anybody before you. Usually there has been in a man's life. There never was in mine. There never will be."

His firm hand closed on hers.

"I'm such an ordinary, every day sort of fellow," he said wistfully, "that, after I began to realise how wonderful you are, I've been terribly afraid I wasn't up to you.

"Even if I have cursed out your theories and creeds, it almost seemed impertinent for me to do it, because you really have so many talents and accomplishments, so much knowledge, so infinite a capacity for things of the mind, which are rather out of my mental sphere. And I've wondered sometimes, even if you ever consented to marry me, whether such a girl as you are could jog along with a business man who likes the arts but doesn't understand them very well and who likes some of his fellow men but not all of them and whose instinct is to punch law-breakers in the nose and not weep over them and lead them to the nearest bar and say, 'Go to it, erring brother!'"

"Jim!"

For all the while he had been drawing her nearer as he was speaking.

And she was in his arms now, laughing a little, crying a little, her flushed face hidden on his shoulder.

He drew a deep breath and, holding her imprisoned, looked down at her.

"Will you marry me, Palla?"

"Oh, Jim, do you want me now?"

"Now, darling, but not this minute, because a clergyman must come first."

It was cruel of him, as well as vigorously indelicate. Her hot blush should have shamed him; her conversion should have sheltered her.

But the man had had a hard time, and the bitterness was but just going.

"Will you marry me, Palla?"

After a long while her stifled whisper came: "You are brutal. Do you think I would do anything else--now?"

"No. And you never would have either."

Lying there close in his arms, she wondered. And, still wondering, she lifted her head and looked up into his eyes--watching them as they neared her own--still trying to see them as his lips touched hers.

He was the sort of man who got hungry when left too long unfed. It was one o'clock. They had gone out to the refrigerator together, his arm around her supple waist, her charming head against his shoulder--both hungry but sentimental.

"And don't you really think," she said for the hundredth time, "that we ought to sell this house?"

"Not a bit of it, darling. We'll run it if we have to live on cereal and do our own laundry."

"You mean I'll have to do that?"

"I'll help after business hours."

"You wonderful boy!"

There seemed to be some delectable things in the ice chest.

They sat side by side on the kitchen table, blissfully nourishing each other. Birds do it. Love-smitten youth does it.

"To think," he said, "that you had the nerve to face those beasts and tell them what you thought of them!"

"Darling!" she remonstrated, placing an olive between his lips.

"You should have the Croix de Guerre," he said indistinctly.

"All I aspire to is a very plain gold ring," she said, smiling at him sideways.

And she slipped her hand into his.

"_Are_ you going back into the army, Jim?" she asked.

"Who said that?" he demanded.

"I--I heard it repeated."

"Not now," he said. "Unless--" His eyes narrowed and he sat swinging his legs with an absent air and puckered brows.

And after a while the same aloof look came into her brown eyes, and she swung her slim feet absently.

Perhaps their remote gaze was fixed on visions of a nearing future, brilliant with happiness, gay with children's voices; perhaps they saw farther than that, where the light grew sombre and where a shadowed sky lowered above a blood-red flood, rising imperceptibly, yet ever rising--a stealthy, crawling crimson tide spreading westward across the world.

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