It was nearing the middle of the afternoon when the airman succeeded,
after some difficulty, in piloting his little companion across
Piccadilly Circus to Regent Street. It is something to be noticed in
that most cosmopolitan of districts, but more than one turned to watch
the solemn officer of the formidable stride and the French girl whose
wealth of hair and length of dress (barely revealing her ankles) made
her seem a vignette from some past century novel.
It had been, for her, a day of wonders.
From her lonely little world, peopled with make-believe inhabitants,
she had been transported through the air to the center of reality.
London, the "Bagdad of the West," huge, monotonous, garish,
beautiful--what term is there in language that could not be applied to
that great gathering of human souls?--London sprawled before her gaze
in a yellow sunlight which played such tricks with its tired buildings
that age-old stone looked bright and cheerful, and the very dust seemed
like the coating of frost when a thaw succeeds a freezing night.
Before her eyes the pageant of passions passed in endless array.
Poverty and hypocrisy rubbed shoulders with ostentation, greed, and
lust. Streets, crowded with a suffocating similarity of stodgy
dwelling-places, gave way to parks, fragrant with the atmosphere of
romance. Vice stalked unashamed through the thronged streets, and dull,
tired faces, leaving monotony in their trail, passed their next of kin
without a glance, those to whom discouragement had come as some
incurable disease. Sinister, sensuous eyes looked into hers, and
children pure in mind as snowflakes laughed as they walked beside their
nurses.
For the sun was in the heavens--and the same warmth that brings the
beauty of a narcissus into being gives life to the noisome, crawling
things that feed on decay.
London's costume drama was at its height; uniformed men and girls
paraded in their thousands. There were loose-limbed Colonials,
slouchily-smart British Tommies, amazingly serious Americans;
bus-girls, land-girls, girls on motor-cycles, and girls driving
ambulances; graceful French officers, swarthy Italians, impassive
Japanese, and ruddy-faced British sailors seeking a day's diversion
from the sentry-go of the sea.
From the great, throbbing city a babel of voices rose, like the sound
from a gigantic mart; hurrying, restless vehicles worried their way
through the maze of traffic; Youth with its carelessness of years
elbowed Age, waiting with weakening tread the call of the Reaper to
whom all men's lives are but sands that run their little course. Over
the whole city brooded the Past.
Take all the comedies of the centuries; gather the tragedies of
history; piece them together with the fancies of a madman's brain--and
what could they offer in the play of human emotions that would compare
with one hour of London's life?
They had gone a little way down Regent Street when an exclamation of
delight escaped from the girl.
"_Tiens!_" She caught the airman by the arm. "Papa Joffre!"
A one-legged man with outstretched cap was seated on the pavement, and
beside him were five colored drawings vaguely suggesting men of the
times.
"But he is wonderful," cried the girl. "See--it is Papa Joffre himself!
Monsieur, you will give him a little present?"
The airman presented the art-exhibitor with half-a-crown, receiving a
gin-and-watery blessing in return, as they strolled on their way.
"She's the fust one," muttered the cripple, preparing to close business
for the day, "as 'as recognoized that there dial of Juff's this last
four month. It were a rotten drawink and no mistike. Blime! I'll give
that cove this 'arf-crown to draw me a picter of this 'ere General Fush
as what is getting hisself talked abaht."
He saw a shadow on the pavement and held out his cap. A Jewish rabbi,
with sallow brow and spiritual face, passed without a glance, his
flowing robes oddly reminiscent of the Levite in that Past to which the
age of London is mere immaturity.
The wanderers turned into Pall Mall, and, traversing it, reached the
Strand, where the meeting of human currents forms a whirlpool.
Threading their way with difficulty, he felt the restraining hand on
his arm, as he had done two hundred times that day. The girl had
stopped opposite a hollow-eyed old woman offering violets, from her
seat on a box, to the thousands who cared as little for her flowers as
for her.
Once more he produced the inevitable coin, and again received a
blessing, as trembling, unlovely fingers clutched it. He was about to
turn away, when something almost attractive in the wrinkled face held
his attention. The woman had looked searchingly at the girl, then into
his eyes, and, touched by sudden sympathy, there was a faded echo of
comeliness in her features that came and went, like a glow caused by a
breath of air on ashes that seemed dead.
"What is it, mother?" he asked, holding the girl's arm. "Business bad?"
"Yes--yes," answered the woman in a low, weak voice; "but it's her I'm
thinking of. Take care of her, laddie, won't you?"
The girl, unable to understand them, leaned over and smiled into the
wrinkled face. With a little air of embarrassment Pippa picked
half-a-dozen violets from her cluster, holding them out to the woman,
who took them with strangely twitching features, just as an encircling
current of the Strand caught them in its grip and carried them away.
Although they had rested at noon in a quiet hostelry in Oxford Street,
after visiting Kensington Gardens where the delightful statue of Peter
Pan pleads for belief in fairies, it was obvious that the strain of
countless impressions was beginning to bring fatigue to his charge.
Accordingly the airman paused in the doorway of a theater and drew her
away from the traffic's turmoil.
"It is three-thirty," he said, "and there is a performance inside."
Her eyes, which still held their tenderness for the woman of the
flowers, sparkled happily.
"That is delightful monsieur. Is it a play as I read in my books?"
"Alas, Pippa! there are no more plays--only revues."
"But there is music?"
"There is an orchestra."
"It will be droll, monsieur?"
"I doubt it, little one; but we shall see."
Purchasing tickets from a lordly being in a cage, they entered the
theater, where a huge audience was rocking with laughter at the three
hundred and sixteenth performance of _Oh Aunt!_ They took their seats
just in time to hear the best of a scene between two comedians who,
lest the subtlety of their wit be lost, were talking at the top of
their lung-power, pulling chairs from underneath one another, colliding
frequently, and every now and then, to emphasize some point, kicking
each other.
Several minutes passed, and wonderingly the French girl gazed at the
pair, while the melancholy of her escort's face reached an intensity
that threatened tears.
"Monsieur."
He inclined his face towards hers.
"Monsieur--they are----?" She did not complete the sentence, but her
shoulders conveyed her meaning.
He smiled sadly. "They are," he said.
She sighed sympathetically. "Poor gentlemen!" she murmured.
After that the comedians sang a duet, the words of which dealt with
marital infidelity, that screamingly funny subject on which the stage
of to-day builds its humorous efforts. Once the verse ended with an
innuendo so crude that a gathering of navvies might have resented it.
There was a laugh and a gasp from the audience--then wild applause; the
song could not go on for the riot of appreciation. One of the comedians
(who had sung it only three hundred and fifteen times) tried to
commence the next verse, but was suddenly overcome with laughter
himself. The guffaws became a barrage; then, as the other singer turned
abruptly about, his shoulders heaving convulsively, the din grew to
drum-fire and was deafening. How richly humorous! It was really too
much! People held their sides and gasped for breath.--"Have you seen
_Oh Aunt_? My dear, it is _too_ killing for words."
Up in the gallery one man sat with an unsmiling face. He was a wounded
Tommy who had been blown from a ditch to the top of a barn, and from
the barn to another ditch. He had had his fill of slapstick comedy.
When the song was over there were shrieks of forced, girlish laughter,
and nearly forty young women in various stages of dishabille rushed on
the stage, exhibiting to a critical audience the charms and the defects
of their forty individual forms. The producer had been both daring and
sparing. He was a second-rate burlesque manager in New York, but
London, that great haven for American mediocrity, recognized his
genius, and gave him a chance. He knew the value of a chorus, and how
to get the best out of them--oh, he knew!
"Monsieur."
The officer turned slowly and looked at the girl beside him. Her face
was flushed and her eyes stared at the ground.
"Yes, little one?"
"Please--take me away."
Without questioning her further, he reached for his cap, and amid the
wondering glances of the people around, they left the theater. He
paused in the foyer and put on his gloves.
"I am sorry, Pippa," he said gravely.
Her hand stole soothingly into his arm, and both of them, unknown to
each other, experienced a feeling that he was the younger of the two.
After all, every woman is a potential mother, and men are only boys
grown serious; so she comforted him with the touch of her hand,
and--perhaps it was the natural contraction in putting on the
glove--his arm pressed hers tight to his side.
And though he was a man, he understood. It is not precept or preaching
that teaches it. Modesty in a girl is instinctive; and the little lady
from the mill-house had known no other teacher than instinct.
Outside the theater an attendant was changing the performance number of
_Oh Aunt!_ from 316 to 317.
X
Twenty minutes later, in the large tea-rooms of a fashionable hotel
just off the Strand, there was a murmur of interest as a
flying-officer, quizzically dejected of countenance, entered with a
young lady, who glanced shyly about, and whose fingers held his,
timidly but confidingly.
He secured a table, and ordered tea from a pleasant waitress. This
accomplished, he said something to his companion, who was sitting
bolt-upright, keeping a steady gaze on her hands crossed on her lap.
Smiling a little, she slowly raised her face and looked into his. A
young Canadian subaltern, seated at a table with a woman whose
overpowdered, meaningless beauty was only too eloquent, stopped in some
remark he was making. Something in the French girl's face had sent his
mind, smitten with loneliness, speeding across the Atlantic to a home
whence a mother and a sister had sent the finest thing they had across
the seas.
Near them, two girls, fresh of face, tittered and posed, challenging
the eyes of every man who entered, with a brazen immodesty strangely at
variance with their appearance of decent breeding. At a farther table a
young woman, with a beauty that was marred by too hard a mouth, sat
with her mother and listened to that woman's urging that she should
marry a wealthy Jew who had asked for her hand. Was it not her duty to
herself and to her mother? Besides, even if that young fellow did come
back uncrippled from the trenches--which was unlikely--he would have to
begin all over again. Alone, a good-looking artist, discharged from the
army with wounds, sat with an insouciant, mocking eye, searching for
types and adventure. Around him women of all ages, some of them with
men, smoked, while their chatter mixed discordantly with the orchestra
playing some negroid ragtime piece, and with the sound of rattling
tea-cups.
"Your Majesty," said the miller's niece, relapsing into her former
style of address, "there is so much I cannot understand."
"Such as what, youngster?"
"These ladies here. Some are so pretty and so nice. Others are pretty
and----" Again she shrugged her shoulders as only a French woman can.
"I am so young, it is true--but see that lady there."
"With the young Canadian--yes?"
"Somehow, monsieur, she frightens me. I did not know that women ever
looked that way--like Louis when he catches a mouse."
"The simile is very apt, Pippa."
"But then"--her brows puckered with a first endeavor to harness
language to her psychology--"you can see that nice girl there, so fair
and pink."
"I prefer them dark," said he seriously; "but what of her?"
The expounder of philosophy breathed deeply, but stuck to her task.
"I think," she said, "that the fair girl is nice, but this one is ..."
(shrug) ... "Then why, monsieur, does the nice one try to look just
like the other?--_Regardez-moi ça_--see her now."
He poured out the tea, which had just arrived.
"Shall I tell you a story?" he asked.
She sighed happily. "Tell me a true story," she said with that
insistence of the young on making all things believable.
He sipped his tea and frowned meditatively.
"Not long ago, my dear, there lived a stupid king."
"Your father?"
"In any one but you, Pippa, that would be pert. No, he was not my
father."
"I wonder if Louis----" she began, but he checked her with a portentous
frown.
"Once," he began again, "there lived a stupid king named Convention."
"What a silly name!"
"Pippa!" he admonished her with a warning finger.
She tried to look serious, but ended by laughing mischievously.
"There was a stupid king with a silly name?" she said encouragingly.
"This king," he said, "was very wise in some things, and often kind,
but his courtiers were a poor lot--Hypocrisy, Snobbery, Good and Bad
Form, and a lot of others. Now the king used to favor the men among his
subjects."
"You mean, he liked men?"
"Yes."
"So do I," she said in an outburst of frankness. "They are so droll."
He poured some fresh tea into the cups.
"This King Convention," he said, after a thoughtful pause, "said that
men could do a lot of things that women could not, which made the women
very angry. Now the king had a jester named Shaw."
"What is a jester?"
"A man who makes jokes that people may laugh."
"Why do they laugh at jokes?"
"Well, in England--especially on the stage--it is from the pleasure of
meeting old friends. As a race, we are rather sentimental about our
jests, and don't take kindly to new ones."
She sipped some tea, holding the cup in both hands, but with
considerable daintiness.
"Tell me an English joke," she said.
He stroked his faded little mustache.
"The House of Lords," he ventured, after some thought.
"_Hé!_ Is that funny?"
"Very."
"I do not laugh. Tell me another."
He broke a corner off a piece of toast.
"One of the richest bits of humor in England," he said, "is the idea
that children born into wealthy or titled families are superior clay to
their fellows."
Pippa thought tremendously.
"I think, monsieur, I know why you look so sad. It is because of what
you have to laugh at in your country.... But please go on and tell me
what happened to--how say you it?--the jester."
"Ah yes. Well, G. B. Shaw----"
"What is this--G. B.?"
"Those are his names--Gor' Blime Shaw."
Pippa sighed. It was very difficult to become interested in people of
such strange nomenclature.
"What did he, then, this Gor Shaw?" she asked, feeling that the story
must end sometime.
"Well, as a matter of fact, he was rather a poor jester, because his
only joke was to stand on his head. At first every one laughed; but
after a while they thought that it was his natural position, and paid
no attention to him. It was really pretty hard on the poor chap,
because he was too old to learn any new tricks, and he used to become
dizzy from being upside-down so much. Finally he grew furious at the
king for not laughing, and urged all the women who did not like
Convention to murder him. When the war came along they saw their
chance. The men went away, and the real women of England were too busy
helping them to bother about anything else. You see, Pippa, in our
country we have the noisy, chattering, selfish women who do good by
lime-light and find their reward in the illustrated journals. But there
are also those, the unrecognized and unthanked ones, who share others'
griefs, but suffer alone. It is the unseen, unheard women of Britain
who are really wonderful."
The girl said nothing, but her face, so suggestive of color in its
elusive change of expression, softened to a tender mood that left her
eyes very dark and somber, and her lips curved slightly into a smile
that was full of sympathy.
The young Canadian subaltern looked directly at her and compressed his
lower lip with his teeth.
"What's the matter, dearie?" croaked the woman beside him; but he
returned no answer.
The two tittering girls stopped their staccato giggling for a moment,
then resumed with a steadfastness of purpose that somehow robbed the
effect of spontaneity. The young woman with the over-firm mouth took in
the tableau of the airman and his little charge, and turned to her
mother with some sarcastic comment that was strangely belied by the
look of hunger in her eyes. The artist, still with his air of graceful
insouciance, sat with half-closed eyelids and visualized Pippa as a
subject for canvas. "What a Psyche she would make!" he muttered. The
orchestra was just going to play, when the leader, who had been idly
gazing at the throng of guests, made a gesture of dissent.
"We shall not do 'Oh, that Opium Rag,'" he said. "You see that girl
there, with the dark curls and the sweet little face? For her let us
play Mendelssohn's 'Spring Song.'"
Quite unaware of their interested audience, the flying-man and his
companion continued their excursion into the realm of fables, while
untouched toast and half-emptied cups stood by in neglected array.
"That is practically all the story," he said. "When the war came on,
they murdered poor old Convention."
"Oh!"
"Slaughtered him," he said gloomily; "though all his bad courtiers
escaped. For a long time it was feared that the king's son, Courtesy,
and his niece, Charm (who were very much in love with each other), had
also been done to death, but there are rumors that they have been seen
in remote parts of England. So, Pippa, that is why these young women
look and act alike. They are the murderers of Convention."
"Monsieur, I am frightened."
He produced his pipe, received a horrified look from a gorgeous waiter,
and hurriedly replaced it in his pocket. "The first thing the women
did," he went on, "was to place Vulgarity and his Queen, Stupidity, on
the throne; but there are signs that their reign will be brief. When
the men come back and the quiet women speak, I think we shall see
another Revolution that will put Courtesy and Charm in the place of
Vulgarity and Stupidity. So, after all, my dear"--he grew quite
cheerful at the thought--"poor old Shaw may have done some good in
inciting the murder of Convention. Perhaps, though the thought would
annoy him frightfully, he may yet go down to history as a martyr--the
reformer who stood on his head!"
But she was not listening to him. She was silently enjoying, for the
first time, the fragrance of Mendelssohn's Melody of Spring, which
found immediate response in her nature, so attuned to the delicate
things of life. It had a somewhat contrary effect on the others, whose
conversation, which had begun to lag, took on fresh impetus with the
sound of the orchestra.
"Tell me," she whispered, vastly puzzled, "why do they talk so loud
when there is music?"
He shook his head. "I don't know," he answered. "It is said that music
soothes the savage breast--it certainly loosens the civilized tongue."
The charming setting to the happiness of Spring-time, written by a
composer who really never grew up, came to an end, and in sheer delight
the French girl clapped her hands twice. The leader acknowledged the
compliment by bowing. She did not know that it was for her alone he had
chosen it.
The airman examined his watch. "Little one," he said, "I am afraid our
day is nearly over. In half-an-hour we must catch a train back to 'The
Plough and Crown,' where we shall have dinner and a little rest. At
eight o'clock two friends of mine from the aerodrome here will bring
the machine--you understand that taking young ladies from France to
England has not been officially authorized by the Air Ministry. As soon
as the stars are out we shall start for home."
They rose to go.
She smiled shyly at the orchestra, and once more the leader bowed. With
the daintiest of gestures she raised her hand and waved to him; then,
feeling for her protector's arm, she started for the door, her eyes
timidly glancing about her from beneath sheltering, downcast eyelashes.
Without the least embarrassment, the tanned airman with the strangely
light moustache and eyebrows walked beside her, experiencing an
indefinable sense of possession that proved most agreeable.
The artist toyed with an unlit cigarette. "With such a model," he
muttered, "if I could only indicate that swift rhythm of expression, I
should be great."
The tittering girls kept up their chatter. They had long since learned
that nothing stifles thought like meaningless conversation--and they
were afraid their thoughts might be unpleasant.
The young woman with the over-firm mouth drew back as the airman and
his companion passed her table, but her eyes clung to the French girl's
face as though its winsomeness and purity held the answer to her
troubles. Swift as imagination itself, her mind leaped to France,
picturing a young fellow who, if he did come back unmaimed, would have
to begin all over again.
"Mother," she said, with hot resentment in her voice, "I am entitled to
my own life. I have seen too many tragedies in material marriages to
dread one of love."
"You are a fool," said the other; and because she was the stronger of
the two, she prevailed.
The woman who looked as Louis did when he caught a mouse turned on the
Canadian boy, who had followed Pippa with a far-away, dreamy stare.
"What's the matter, dearie?" she queried, with the tedious endearment
of her class.
He brought himself from the reveries that had strangely blended the
French girl's face with the faces of two other women across the sea;
then he looked into his companion's with its leering comeliness. With a
quick, decisive movement he rose to his feet, and, feeling for his
pocket-book, placed a pound-note on the table.
"Pay for what we've had," he said, his jaw stiffening, but his voice
shaking oddly.
"What! aren't I going to see you again?"
He was going to speak, but changed his mind, and, turning on his heel,
strode from the place, his spurs jingling with each step ... and there
was something in his face that made people keep silent as he passed.