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 hell 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 space 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.
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 hell 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 impassive. 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 prone 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.