DROP-SCENE
"There is no man that imparteth his griefs to his friend but he
grieveth the less."
Bacon.
Mrs. Cartwright went up to her room, but she did not pack those bags of
hers at once.
Instead, she put on her coat, tied a scarf over her head, changed her
shoes, and went for a walk.
She knew that she must tire herself out. She had thought she was rather
tired already from her tussle with the waves that afternoon, but that
wasn't enough. She must be more exhausted before she could sleep for a
few hours. She would order them to call her very early in the morning,
so that she could be packed and off before any of the other visitors had
left their rooms.
She set out, and she couldn't have told anybody in what direction. A
path was soft--probably with pine-needles--beneath her feet. Before her
eyes there was a striping of light on darkness; still a moon between the
trees.
She walked. She could not have said off-hand what she thought about as
she swung along. Not many definite thoughts filled her mind. Only a very
definite picture of young Awdas's fair eaglet face, looking with
startled and pleased surprise into the face of that beautiful girl. One
look; the boy had just been taken aback at the sight of a stranger, and
such an unusually pretty one. Then and there Claudia Cartwright didn't
herself know _why_ she knew that this, the look that did not seem to
mean anything, meant ... everything.
It meant that she, the woman at her last love affair who had been within
an inch of accepting the proposal of that boy, must begin to pay,
already, for her one moment of ecstasy.
The coming of that girl had stopped not one, but all kisses for her.
She knew what was coming between that boy, all awakened and malleable
from his first passion, and that girl. They were heritors of an age in
which Love has quickened his pace to keep up with the double-march of
war.
She was resigned. She had foreseen it. Hadn't she said to him, "Wait
until you see me beside a real young girl"? It had come upon her rather
abruptly, that was all, but she need not really allow herself to
suffer....
She whistled a little tune between her teeth as she swung along. She was
thinking of nothing, she was just moving quickly and regularly, as a
mechanical toy that has been wound up to go for a certain time before
the machinery runs down.
So mechanically, so fast she covered the ground. Suddenly a voice called
out, "Halt! Who's there? Mrs. Cartwright?"
With a start, she found that she was in the forest, approaching the
clearing and the woodcutter's hut. The sturdy, square-set figure that,
coming away from the hut, had encountered her on the moon-dappled path,
was that of Captain Ross.
"Hullo!" she returned, brightly. "Have you been cat-calling on Mr.
Brown? Isn't it perfectly lovely? After all, this is the time of day to
go for walks, I find."
"Is that so? I thought this was the time of day you sat writing your
great worrrks."
"Sometimes; but how did you know?"
"You told me you were sitting up working that last time Awdas had that
infairrrnal dream of his," said the Staff-officer. "That was how."
But at this the machinery that had kept Mrs.
Cartwright going so steadily for the last hour or more, broke down
without warning. Without warning, she blurted out in a low, unnatural
voice, "Oh, Captain Ross! I am----in such trouble."
Her limbs failed her and she would have fallen.
The next moment she found that she was sitting upon a pine-log, with her
head upon the solid support of Captain Ross's shoulder, and with his arm
thrown very comfortingly about her. She wept, copiously and silently,
all her tears; the only tears a man had ever seen Claudia Cartwright
shed.
This man, to his eternal honour, made no attempt to check them or to
enquire into them. He sat there, supporting her, clasping her with the
arm of a brother--this man whom she had not before regarded as any
particular friend of hers. She wept, taking his handkerchief, large and
scented with cigarettes, that he presently stuffed into her hands. She
knew that she must be making him feel miserably uncomfortable and upset;
she cried on, unashamed in the silence of the wood, telling herself that
it would be for the one and only time that she would give herself this
relief. Presently she sobbed out, "I loved him----"
Captain Ross's "Is that so?" was entirely unstartled and matter-of-fact.
Actually he had been too pole-axed with amazement to do anything but the
natural thing; but a finer judge of women might have been less of a
comfort to her. He sat holding her stolidly until she gave the
long-drawn breath and the apology that mark the ebbing of the storm.
"Thank you so much," she was able to say presently, almost as lightly as
if he had put a coffee-cup down for it. "You'll forget it, I know. I
must just tell you that it was in my own hands. I refused him. I shall
be glad, presently. But----"
She paused, and the man muttered awkwardly something about wishing there
were anything he could do----
She spoke softly but gravely now. "Captain Ross! Be very gentle, won't
you, with that little, young girl?"
Captain Ross did not ask what young girl she meant.
PART II
CHAPTER I
THE CHARM NEGLECTED
"Few people realize that Love is a hybernating animal."
Extract from Private Letter.
Olwen Howel-jones sat at her War work in room 0369 on the sixth floor of
some Government offices called----
We will call them The Honeycomb.
The entrance to this hive of activity was near Charing Cross, and its
courtyard was one continual procession of cars, cyclists,
motor-cyclists, dispatch cycles with little side-car mail vans, also of
men in every conceivable uniform; most of them (as befitted a swarm of
such bees!) were decorated with wings.... Goodness knows how many
telephone extensions The Honeycomb possessed! Lifts carried you up to
floor after floor. Each floor was packed with cells that had been
bedrooms and private sitting-rooms, each cell with workers making
Victory-honey (and perhaps with odd drones watching them do it). The
whole place with its come-and-go of clerks, messengers, telephone girls,
civilians, typists, switchboard girls, and their khakied male superiors,
was in a never-ending buzz.
The small cell marked 0369 had big windows that looked up and down the
Strand: it held three workers.
Olwen's roll-top desk stood back to back with another; the two backs
screening off her colleague of the other desk. This other desk had an
unusual feature. From behind it there came a stream of comments in
different voices, so that it seemed as if several unseen people were
sitting there. These voices were:
FIRST VOICE--A natural girlish treble that slightly rolled its
R's; being the voice of one Mrs. Newton, in charge of cell
0369, who possessed the gift of mimicry.
SECOND VOICE--A masculine drawl that died away of sheer
superiority in the roof of the mouth, after the fashion of one
Major Leefe of that Department.
THIRD VOICE--Rollicking and boyish, intersected by loud "Ha's"
and "Bai Jove's" in the manner of Lieutenant Harold Ellerton,
also of The Honeycomb.
Mingling with the click of the typewriter, at which the third girl sat
in a further corner, came the sound of one or other of these voices.
Thus:
FIRST VOICE--"Miss Howel-Jones, what is the French for 'land'?
Aeroplanes, I mean?"
A murmured "_atterrir_" came from Olwen, immersed in her work, which
meant dividing the morning's correspondence into four batches: A, B, C,
and D.
SECOND VOICE (after a moment of paper-rustling)--"Er--yeh ...
yeh! Wha' have we heah? Letters to be translay' into Fren'.
Yeh. Mrs. Newton, will you atten' to thi' too?"
THIRD VOICE (after more rustling)--"_Damn_ this nib. Oh, sorry,
Mrs. Newton; didn't mean to say damn before you."
FIRST VOICE--"Not at all, Mr. Ellerton; I am a married woman
myself."
FOURTH VOICE (A Scots-Canadian accent)--"Is that so? What I
demand of a woman is that she shall be a rrreliable worrrrkerr.
I don't assk what she does affterr hours, I----"
Here all the voices ceased.
For a quarter of an hour no sound came from behind that desk, but that
of papers being turned, regularly and methodically. Then the busy Mrs.
Newton, not the mimic, spoke.
"Just turn up the Q. M. G. file for last month and see if there's a
letter with this reference."
She gave the reference, and Olwen, after a minute's search in a manilla
"jacket," handed over the letter, leaving a slip of paper sticking out
of the jacket in its place. Having written "Mrs. Newton" and the date
upon that slip, she turned again to her letter-trays. The rustling of
papers was resumed. Then the voices again:
SECOND VOICE--"Claim for missing kit, wha'? How do f'las manage
to be always losing kit? Do _I_ lose kit? Haven't _I_ always
goh' millions pairs bags all beau'fly press'? 'Sides, isn't
even in ah sec.' Room Two--Fi'----Fi'."
THIRD VOICE--"Ha! Reference A. B., stroke two bracket nine oh
one two two dated two twelve seventeen. Do they, bai Jove!"
FIRST VOICE--"Aren't there any more 'C's,' Miss Howel-Jones?"
"Not this morning." Olwen's little black head was bent over the "D"
correspondence, which she dealt with herself. "A" letters were handed to
the typist, who carried them into cell 0368, next door. "B's" and "C's"
were to be thrust into the basket that stood on the top of that
desk-screen, from behind which a hand came up ever and anon to take
letters.
With real enjoyment the Welsh girl worked on.
How amazingly she had altered, in all these weeks, from the one ideaed,
feverish little emotionalist she'd been in the autumn!
Yes. Change of scene and of daily work had laid potent hands upon the
plastic, fundamentally sound nature of this young girl. Routine had
hypnotized her with its rhythmic monotony. She felt the peculiar
attraction of being a tiny cog in all this huge machine of War work. New
thoughts, new feelings, new interests packed her life; new friends, too,
were a revelation to her.
Now came Mrs. Newton's more frivolous voice.
"_Arlette_, _Bubbly_, and _Cheep_, that's my record so far _this_ week;
and tonight I'm going to _Pamela_ for the second time; all thanks to one
very young youth getting four days' leave from the Front!"
Olwen laughed. The solemn little typist, however, rose to take the
letters with a look that practically said, "Some people may be heads of
rooms, but they don't seem to realize there's a war on!" and as she took
the sheaf of papers to be signed in cell 0368 she all but slammed the
door behind her.
"Seventeen; _not_ the best phase of English maidenhood, neither washed
nor kissed," went on the voice of the unseen Mrs. Newton. "Ah! It's
nearly lunch time."
"I shan't be able to lunch with you today, Mrs. Newton," Olwen said
rather quickly. "My Aunt that I stay with is shopping in town today,
so----"
"Say no more," returned Mrs. Newton's voice. "I've got Aunts myself. I
mean I had before I was married. By the way, I told Fascinating Fergus
that I can hear him telephoning his dinner engagements in the next room.
He said, with that aggressive face of his, that there was nothing
prrivatt in those. I said, "Then why drop your voice when you're doing
it?" And why does he, I ask you, insist on being a Tower of Silence in
here, when he _longs_ to be considered a perfect Devil outside? Keeping
his girl friends _well_ round the corner, nobody ever having seen
_one_!... Swank!"
"Oh, he's not as bad as all that," murmured Olwen.
"He's all right at heart perhaps," came from the other side, "but I
_should_ like to take a scraper to him!"
And herewith there merged from behind the desk the source of all the
voices that had been holding forth, in the person of Mrs. Newton.
Her Nile-green silken sports coat alone had cost more than her month's
salary could have paid; her hair was arranged as carefully as though
there was no thought but of her own extremely pretty looks beneath the
broad velvet band that snooded her, but for all that, she was efficient.
Clever, too, at darting the arrows of a bright mind at chiefs and
colleagues alike. She "took in" most things, not in any disguised
fashion, but by turning full upon whatever it was she wished to observe
a pair of large, pale grey and pretty eyes, amused and passionless as
those of a sea-maid. Their stare was even emphasized at times by the
gesture of a slender forefinger and by the clearly-audible "Ah" of that
treble voice.
Olwen enjoyed her thoroughly; her appreciation mingling with a wonder
why she did not sometimes bitterly resent Mrs. Newton and her remarks.
Yes, two months of War work on The Honeycomb had taught Olwen already
more than the A, B, C, and D of her job. Self-possession, serenity and
poise, all newly acquired, were to be noticed now about the young girl
as she sorted her letters (very different from the leisured
correspondence of her Uncle), and smiled, partly at some thought that
she was holding in reserve, and partly at her fellow-worker.
Mrs. Newton began again, "Do you know what I think is the keynote of F.
F.'s character?"
"Fascination, you seem to make out," suggested Olwen, that divided smile
deepening upon her lips. She sometimes thought that Mrs. Newton dwelt
upon the subject of their chief for her (Olwen's) benefit, and she was
prepared for it.
"Ah! But I mean the _real_ keynote. It's _jealousy_," declared the young
married woman. "He's a _jealous_ thing. Hates any other man to have a
show at all. Must have everybody doing their best work, just for his
_beaux yeux_ (not that he's got any, except those teeth). Yes; our
Fergus must be IT in this Honeycomb. He must be _The_ Great Captain----"
She stopped abruptly as the door of cell 0369 opened to frame the black
head, square shoulders, red tabs, and empty sleeve of the man of whom
she'd been speaking; the chief of their section, Captain Fergus Ross
himself.
"Mrs. Newton," he said, in the tone of business unalloyed, "have they
sent up to you a letter that was taken in error to room 0720? A letter
from A G 6, dated the 22nd?"
"It's here, Captain Ross," replied the head of the room in her demurest
treble. "Miss Howel-Jones was attending to it.... Here it is."
"Right. Thank you," said Captain Ross.
His bright dark glance took in the letter that Mrs. Newton handed him;
it passed over the filed stack of other letters; it swept over the two
desks, the typing-table, Miss Lennon's back, the calendar, the pinned-up
Matania drawing on the wall, the green electric-light shades, the glass
on the mantelpiece holding freesias, the chairs, the waste-paper
basket--in short, over every object in the room but one.
For Olwen Howel-Jones, bending absorbed over her work, Captain Ross did
not spare a fraction of his glance.
"Mrs. Newton, I am going out to lunch now," he announced. "Should there
be any enquiries, I shall be back before two-thirty."
"Very well, Captain Ross."
(Exit Captain Ross.)
Then Mrs. Newton in Major Leefe's voice, "Wha'? Old Ferg' gone t' lunch?
_Bet_ you he's taking out some gir', Miss Howel-Jo'."
Olwen smiled undisturbed as she went to put on her her hat.
Twenty minutes later she was sitting at a table for two in a Soho
restaurant, opposite to Captain Ross.
This meeting was not due to any arrangement.
What had happened was that some weeks before, Olwen, having explored all
lunch-time haunts within a mile of the Honeycomb, had found this tiny,
Continentally-appointed restaurant that she chose to call "The Aunt in
Town." This had been on a fishday, and the fish had been deliciously
cooked, as Olwen had reported afterwards. Perhaps Captain Ross did not
overhear her mentioning the restaurant's real name to Major Leefe.
Anyhow, there is no reason to suppose that it was not by chance that
Captain Ross happened upon "The Aunt in Town" upon the very next Friday.
As he saw Miss Howel-Jones sitting at a little table by herself, wasn't
it natural that he should join her? He knew the girl, apart from the
office, knew her Uncle. Absurd if he hadn't come up. But, as you see,
there was a vast difference between his just taking the chair opposite
to her, and his having planned to meet her. He did not attempt to pay
for the chit's lunch. So that was that.
Certainly the fish-curry was excellent.
Captain Ross had already announced that he was fond of fish for lunch.
Consequently he took to haunting that restaurant on Fridays. Why shun
it, merely because Miss Howel-Jones lunched there on that day?
As he would have told you, however, he made a definite rule of never
"going out to lunch" with any woman working on The Honeycomb. With other
girls, from other Government offices--well, that was another story.
There was, for instance, a fair-haired Miss Somebody (who rang him up,
Mrs. Newton had declared, three times a day), but she worked at the
institution we will call The Rabbit Warren. There was also a pretty
little friend of his on The Ant Hill. But from The Honeycomb
itself--nope. Work and social relations must be kept strictly apart.
Olwen had been made to realize that from the first time she had set foot
in the courtyard under those arches and that clock. She had been first
astounded, then hurt, then finally she actually wanted to laugh at the
different Captain Ross he now was from the one she had met at Les Pins.
The change had been sudden as the cut of a knife.
Over there on leave he had idled about the pine-woods and the _plage_;
he had teased her as if she were no more than a pretty child; once he
had given her chocolates; once--ah, that once!--he had held her hand....
Here, idleness was the last thing of which he could be accused. He no
longer teased her with laughter and allusions to "_most_ little girls."
He had given her no more chocolates. As for hand-holding, why! She might
not have had any hands. To be a fellow-worker with him on The Honeycomb
seemed enough to transform any young woman into teak or granite as far
as Captain Ross was concerned.
He had his code.
"I guess no girl friend of mine would ask me for a job where I work,
twice," he'd told Olwen when they had first met in London at her Uncle's
hotel. The Professor's niece, greatly daring, had retorted, "Do you mean
she'd get it the first time of asking?"
"She'd get 'it,' sure thing. In the neck," the young Staff-officer had
explained grimly. "She'd know better than to ask the second time."
So, exactly as he was not taking her out to lunch, Captain Ross had not
secured for her this post on The Honeycomb. He had told Jack Awdas to
get it for her, through his friend Major Leefe. A very different thing.
Olwen had "given up" the subtle reasonings of the sex.
Today he was obviously in a bad temper. Why? After he had ordered his
own lunch, he turned to her with an edgy politeness.
"I hope you enjoyed the show last night, Miss Howel-Jones."
"Show----?" said Olwen, forgetting for a second that she had been taken
to the theatre by Mr. Ellerton, the young R.N.A.S. officer.
"Yes; you were too occupied to notice who else was in the house, I
guess. I was in the dress-sairrcle. I looked right down upon you in the
stalls."
Now, Olwen was losing her habit of the vivid blush that used to scorch
her. She merely coloured up slightly but prettily as she returned, "Oh,
were you?" and proceeded to eat her fish and to discuss the play--which
had been _Romance_. She had thought it lovely.
Captain Ross informed her definitely that he himself had no use for such
sentimental balderdash; and then told her he guessed it made her pretty
late, going back all the way to Wembley Park (where her Aunt lived)
after the theatre. He hoped that at least young Ellerton took her all
the way home.
"Yes, thank you; he did."
"M'm. Last train from Baker Street, I presume. And then you've a long
trail from the station to your house. In the drive, isn't it?"
"Yes, but we didn't go by train at all," the girl explained. "Mr.
Ellerton managed to get a taxi to take us all the way back from town."
"In war-time?" Captain Ross's black-cat-like face was a study in
righteous indignation. Then he took a lighter tone, tilting his chin
contemptuously. "Well! If Mr. Ellerton's got money to burn that way it's
no concairrrrn of mine. Taxis out to Wembley Park with a girl who's
employed in the same office as he is. That's Ellerton's lookout. Not the
kind of thing I'd care to be seen doing myself. (No, I won't have
anything to drink. A ginger-ale, waiter.) Still, if he thinks that's all
right in war-time and for folks on War work together, I've nothing to
say."
The ghost of a smile hovered about Olwen's red mouth as Captain Ross
went on saying this "nothing."
"Sweet as honey to any girl he takes out, no doubt. The regular naval
flirt. He held your hand in the theatre, or some foolishness of that
sort, I daresay."
"He didn't!" retorted little Olwen, quickly, and then a message seemed
to come to her, whispered, perhaps by the generations of girls in love
who still survived in her blood. Upon that instinct she added, "He did
_not_ hold my hand----in the theatre."
The finest judge of women in Europe rose swiftly enough to this. "Is
that so? You mean he only held it in the taxi going home. A much better
scheme altogether."
Olwen, still refusing to meet the aggressive brown eyes that challenged
her over the jar of mimosa on the table, retorted, "I didn't say so."
"It was so, though. Wasn't it?"
"I shan't tell you," said the girl, whose hand had not been held by
anyone since that magic evening in a boat. "Why should I?"
"Don't trouble to tell me. I know."
"Then why d'you ask me?" she returned with a little ripple of laughter.
"Besides, why should you mind?"
"'_Mind?_'" retorted Captain Ross, laughing in his turn, but louder. "If
I'd nothing worse than that to 'mind' about, I shouldn't be the busy man
I am."
He turned to the menu; and Olwen, going on with her lunch, remembered
Mrs. Newton's verdict, "He's a _jealous_ thing!"
She ought to have been wildly delighted....
Curious! She was only flattered; amused.
She felt oddly conscious today, that (to parody a superannuated song),
she was _not_ the only girl in the world, and he was not the only boy.
That little restaurant alone was crowded with girl workers, busy as she
was, being taken out to lunch by khaki of every grade and age; and, by
the way, there was something to be noticed about all these girls and
young women from Government offices. Once, a girl worker found it hard
to hit the mean between being fluffily unsuitable or unbecomingly
severe. Today these girls were approximating to a new type; pretty but
_durable_. The London day that began in the office and ended in
restaurant and theatre with an "on-leaver" without the possibility of
going home to change, had done way with fripperies, but had brought
decorativeness into the worker's kit. _That_ was why skirts were short,
coats impertinently neat, and hair done so that it stayed done.
"Sensible" shoes, too, were now made in pretty styles; and since taxis
were problematical on wet days, rain-coats and rain-hats were at last
becoming things. This mixture of utility and attractiveness was a gift
of war-time to British girlhood.
Olwen gained by it. She also gained by the consciousness that there was
male companionship in the world besides that of Captain Ross. Further,
she knew him so much better, now! Possibly, she was not left
uninfluenced by the daily sallies of Mrs. Newton at the young officer's
expense (for who knows the power of the comment that shows friend or
lover from another's point of view?). No longer was she lacerated by the
thoughts of those other girl friends "kept well around the corner."
Altogether Olwen realized that it was a good thing she no longer
imagined herself desperately in love with Captain Ross, since he, though
interested in all girls, was not "seriously" attracted by her.
(Otherwise, she concluded, he would have said so by this time.) She was
cured; she no longer wore a Charm to win him....
That Charm! One night at Wembley Park the ribbon that held it had come
unsewn. She hadn't had time to stitch it. It hung over her mirror. One
day, perhaps, she would attend to it; but she was always busy now. It
didn't seem to matter....
Captain Ross rose to go. Olwen could picture the expression with which
he'd presently look into cell 0369 to "see" if the workers had all
returned.
She was generally just five minutes behind him.
Today he paused, and said abruptly, "Speaking of theatres--there's a
concert or show of some sort on at the Phoenix Hut, that American
place, next Monday. Awdas rang me up about it. He'd be very pleased if
you'd go."
Mischief danced in Olwen's averted glance. "How jolly! But how funny of
Mr. Awdas not to ask me himself! What time is this concert, Captain
Ross?"
In a wooden voice Captain Ross said, "It starts at eight. If you'd
dinner, say, at seven o'clock here, I could take you along afterwards."
"_You_ could? But you never take girls out from The Honeycomb."
"That's so," agreed Captain Ross, with firmness. "But this is Awdas's
show. You'll be with him. So shall I. Good-bye."
He put on his red-banded hat, thrust his stick and gloves for a moment
into the cross of his belt as he saluted woodenly, and turned.
Olwen burst into a merry laugh. "Captain Ross!"
He turned again.
"It's all right; I was going to that concert anyhow," she told him.
"I'm going with the girl who sings; you know Miss van Huysen!"
Miss Golden van Huysen was now one of Olwen's best friends.
CHAPTER II
THE LAST ALLIES
"They have looked each other between the eyes, and there they have
found no fault,
They have taken the Oath of the Brother-in-Blood on leavened bread
and salt."
Kipling.
The War-missioner on the platform paused for a moment to look at his
watch.
Then he resumed, in the rich deep voice that spoke English not as the
English speak it, the voice that had done so much to bring the help of
his great country into the War.
"But you'd rather be hearing Miss van Huysen sing; and if you wouldn't,
I would. So I'll just say this one thing to you men and women at the
Phoenix Hut tonight. I want you to look at this flag." He pointed to
the right-hand one of the two flags that backed him where he stood; the
Stars and Stripes.
"And now--I want to think of another flag. Our stars only stand for
stars that are older still."
The orator's fine grey head was lifted as if he could see those stars
above the many-pointed roof of the hut; stars of the night sky.
"Those stars don't change. They're rising all the while, right round the
world. They were there, those stars, before you or I were heard of. They
will be there when we are gone. I see them as the stars of Love and
Home. And I'll tell you, friends, what I see in those stripes, too. I
see the whole world turning round to Daybreak, and those stripes are the
rays of the Dawn."
Measured as the roll of distant drums, as soft, as stirring, the
War-missionary's voice sounded through a silence which could be felt.
"The Dawn seems a long time in coming, but that it is coming is sure;
sure as our men are on the ocean now! That's all I have to say. It
wouldn't be any truer if I said it twenty times, and it wouldn't be any
less true if I never said it at all.... So now--Mr. Reynolds?"
The orator smiled to the dark, clean-shaven official with the high khaki
collar and stepped quickly down off the platform. Just as he did so he
looked back at the Stars and Stripes. "Not 'Old Glory' now," he added as
if the thought had just come to him. "'New Glory,' joined with the Old,"
and his smile was for the Union Jack.
His talk, as homely as the gossip of a camp, yet somehow as high as the
stars to which it pointed, was not of the kind that provokes violent
applause. The whole assembly in that big hall felt that it was not mere
applause that the orater and his kind were out to win. Quiet brooded for
a moment over the meeting, over the mingling of Allies in khaki; and
over the rows of big-framed, bold-featured Americans in uniforms of
brown and blue, all clean-shaven as were those Normans of whom King
Harold said, "_Those priests will make good soldiers._"
Then the spell was relaxed; there was a little sputtering of matches as
pipes were relighted. Men began to talk. And little Olwen Howel-Jones,
who was one of the visitors occupying the two front rows of chairs
settled herself for the singing.
On her lap was a great soft heap of leopard-skin furs. They belonged to
Miss van Huysen (the girl who was going to sing as soon as she could be
fetched from saying good-bye to a party of sailors who were taking their
leave in the billiard-room). Miss van Huysen's seat, next to Olwen, had
just been slid into by Captain Ross, who would have to leave it as soon
as the singer had finished; Olwen thought he must have something to say
to her, but apparently he hadn't. On her other side sat Mrs. Cartwright,
serene and smiling, with her hand lying in that of the very young man
who accompanied her. This very young man, aged fifteen, was Keith, her
elder son, now in London with his mother on account of measles at his
school. In the row behind them, his long legs rather cramped, sat Jack
Awdas, the flyer, with the rest of the party from The Honeycomb; Leefe,
Ellerton, little Mrs. Newton, and one or two other R.F.C. officers.
Since Captain Ross did not seem to have anything to say to her, Olwen
found time to glance about this great hall which was only one room of
the Phoenix Hut.
The keynote to the whole place--with its spaciousness of comfort, its
shields of Harvard, Yale, and the other colleges, its flags, its palms,
its theatrical posters, and its three glowing fireplaces, might be found
in the great pedestalled image of the American Eagle, carved in grey
stone and set up in the middle of the hall. Stately he stood with
outstretched wings, poised and ready to strike; and from one of those
wings dangled the blue jacket of some American sailor, while upon the
huge bird's head there was perched an American soldier's cowboy hat.
It seemed so typical, that mixture of dignity and gaiety!
Suddenly a rustle and a buzz went round the hall, then the applause
broke out in a storm as of summer rain.
Miss Golden van Huysen, the singer, had come quickly through the doors
that led from the billiard-room smiling an apology for her absence.
Olwen's glance flew back to the platform as her friend stepped forward
up to it.
There she stood facing all eyes, a vision of white and gold. There she
shone, in front of all the illuminating lights. Into that place, already
bright, she brought an added radiance as of the June sun on a field of
buttercups. Golden was her name; golden her hair, golden the girdle that
clipped her, its long ends falling to the hem of her skirt. Olwen looked
at the glorious young form, symbolical as that of a goddess on a golden
coin.
"Isn't she beautiful tonight!" she breathed.
Every man in the hall must have agreed with her, and the blue eyes of at
least one Englishman there said as much.
They were the eyes of Jack Awdas.
CHAPTER III
RECOVERY OF THE CHARM
"One sudden gleam of a face, and my cherished Ideal is real!
There moved my miracle, there passed my Fate whom to see is
to love."
Brunton Stephens.
Those eyes of Jack Awdas's had known their business from the start.
Wise Mrs. Cartwright, to have known what would happen, even as she sat
in that basket-chair in that hotel lounge at Les Pins, all those weeks
ago!
It had happened instantaneously. The electric flash had not been quicker
than the glance that had passed from young eyes to young eyes.
Those months ago!...
Mrs. Cartwright had left the French hotel the morning after--had left
Les Pins and the man she had refused. Her place at table next to Jack
Awdas had been given (as she guessed it would be given) to her
successor.
That goddess-built young American had made friends with everybody,
easily and at once. The French families had regarded her as if she'd
been a visitant from another planet. Olwen Howel-Jones had been
subjugated on the spot. But Jack Awdas from the very first _dejeuner_
had scarcely for a moment left her side.
Never before had he seen a girl so frank, yet so apart, so boyish in
her unaffected good-fellowship, yet so womanly.
Unchaperoned she had travelled from the States to join her father in
London, where he was attached to the Embassy, and where she meant to
continue her special War work. But upon landing at Bordeaux she had
found a cable from him stating that he would be out town for some days.
She'd had no use for an empty house. So she had decided to stay in
France and by the sea for those few days.
To young Jack Awdas they were a gift from Destiny!
* * * * *
Some people consider that the truest and most human touch in the world's
greatest love drama is that which pitches the young man already
infatuated with one woman into the purest passion for another. There is
no hiatus of feeling between the gloomy "_I am done_" of Romeo sighing
for Rosaline, and his quick "_What lady's that?_" when Juliet appears;
there is no thought of that first lady afterwards.
Yet who shall measure what Juliet owes to Rosaline?--what rough ways
made smooth, what cold young crudities softened and warmed, what
kindling of susceptibility, what speeding-up of passion?
And, for all this, what thanks may Rosaline expect? "_Oh, she was just
someone he used to think he cared for._" Or, "_I'm sure she couldn't
have been a very nice woman._" Or even "_Horrid! Robbing the cradle, I
call it; I don't know how any woman can!_"
But none of these verdicts would ever be passed by Golden van Huysen,
either upon Claudia Cartwright or upon any other woman. She had read of
the theory that women are "catty" to their own sex; smilingly she
disbelieved it. Like attracts like. Just as her own heart had never
known an ungenerous prompting, so her own lips had never uttered a
spiteful remark. She therefore never heard one. If she had, she would
probably have widened her blue eyes and exclaimed with a little air of
discovery, "Why, that's not _kind_!"
And this big and innocent creature was the very type which (if she'd had
her choice) Mrs. Cartwright would have chosen for the man whom she
herself was too old to choose.
* * * * *
He didn't ask Golden van Huysen to marry him on the first day of their
acquaintance. No! He had waited until the third day.
"Mustn't rush things," he'd told himself, as if those three days had
been three years' duteous service of a knight of old. So he had merely
made himself into this young girl's shadow.
To her it was no novelty to be attended and worshipped. Wasn't every
girl that she cared to know accustomed to this setting of masculine
worship? Golden took as naturally as she took air and food the existence
of a train of such young knights.
Only ... from the first she realized vaguely that this one was somehow
different from the others she had known and liked. This tall young man
with the small crested head set on his sweeping, wing-like shoulders,
who had drawn her first quick glance in the lounge. She admitted it
quite frankly to herself this young flying-man _fascinated_ her.
Why was it?
She had met plenty of flying-men before. Hadn't she talked to them in
the aerodromes of her own country--which was also the birthplace of that
very marvel, flying? Hadn't she been introduced to her aviators who had
broken records for altitude, distance, and time? Hadn't she danced at
balls with some of the very first pilots who'd ever looped? Flying and
flyers had been no new proposition to her, but _this_ flyer....
Presently the young American girl began to realize what it was that was
new and special about "this flyer."
It was symbolized in the little gold stripe on the cuff of his
flying-jacket. He was the very first _fighting_ flyer who had crossed
her path. The first she'd met who had already given battle to men in the
air, the first she'd known who had been shot down in fighting for the
cause which was now her country's too.
Never before had she seen a man who had actually used her country's
invention of flying as the instrument of battle.
She, with her whole country, had wished to use this invention as a
beneficent gift.
Her country had seen that _before this gift could be so used_, stern
work lay before the men of the air. She saw it, too.... As that
War-missioner had said. Her country was looking with other eyes upon her
Allies.
For Golden these new friends were typified in the young Briton who wore
the wound stripe as well as the wings.
She told herself wonderingly, "Now isn't it queer that I should ever
come to like one of the English so well. This Bird-boy is quite nice
enough to be an American...."
Neither of the young people remembered afterwards at what exact moment
of that second day she had called him "Bird-boy." Though he took it
with a hidden lift of the heart, he did not use any name at all to her
until the third day.
On the morning of that day she announced to him that it would be her
last day at Les Pins.
"What? Going?" he cried aghast, as if the idea that she must one day go
had never occurred to him.
"Why, yes! I'd never meant to stay here at all. It was just because of
father, and now he cables me he'll be back in London before I shall."
"Well, but I say!" Jack Awdas broke in in consternation. "Shan't I see
you any more?" It seemed unspeakable.
"Didn't you tell me you were coming back to London at the end of the
fall, to a Board or something? My father would be pleased if you came
and saw us then."
"But that's not for ages!" he cried, his face blank. "I'm not due back
in town for another month! When are you going? Tonight? Tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow morning early, to Bordeaux; then on to Paris, then London."
"All by yourself?" exclaimed the young Englishman stupefied.
She laughed. "Why, certainly, 'all by myself.' That's funny! Why, I've
made all the travelling arrangements for father and myself since I was
twelve! I'm a lot more useful than he is, that way. I've been most all
over the world. 'All by myself.' Why, yes! You're shocked? Now isn't
that real old-fashioned, and English? It's the way they talk in those
novels with the sweet little heroine in book-muslin, whatever that is,
in the days of Queen Victoria. Haven't you got past that, in this War?
If you haven't it's time America did come in and teach you a few things!
I guess I'm as capable as you are of looking after myself, Bird-boy!"
"You certainly aren't," he declared resolutely. "I shouldn't let you,
if--if I were anything to do with you." He pulled himself together and
added, "Well, there's all today, anyhow. Look here, can't you let me
take you somewhere jolly all by myself, just for today?"
He could never have made this suggestion to a young woman of the
traditions and upbringing of, say Miss Agatha Walsh. But already he knew
that SHE would take it as it was meant.
"Why, yes, if you like," she said.
So they'd gone off to Cap Ferret. Midday had found this tall girl and
boy upon Biscay shore where four days before Mrs. Cartwright's
dove-lunch party had walked, watching those rollers. Soaring to crash,
gathering and soaring once again to crash, those great waves boomed the
chorus that had sounded across wide sea and wide shore long "before the
months had names." It would go on sounding long after the names of those
two on the seashore had ceased to be music to those who loved them.
But this was the moment when the waves sang for them, only for them.
Golden van Huysen had said something about surf-riding. The young
aviator, his eyes turning for a moment from her to the tumultuous
waters, had muttered, "Dangerous game for a girl!"
She laughed. "What a lot of things there are that you English think a
girl can't do! It would do you lots of good to get to know some
American girls. Then you'd see!"
He made no reply. His eyes were again upon her.
She wore what he had come to know were (out of uniform) her only
colours; white and gold. Her dress of some creamy white stuff, perfectly
cut, and over it she had slipped a knitted coat of yellowy silk. Crisp
as a gardenia-petal, her skirt blew out above her ankles, and her feet,
not small, but shapely as those of a sandalled Hermes. No hat hid her
hair, which glinted like a casque in the sun as they turned away from
the sea towards the dunes.
Here Jack Awdas took the plunge.
"See some American girls, you say? You're all the girl I want to see,"
he declared, not knowing that he spoke with the boyish vehemence that
had so lately taken Claudia Cartwright's breath. The persistence with
which he'd wooed that first love he now turned upon this--this only love
of his.
"You're all the girls in the world to me," said he. "D'you understand?"
She did, and she did not. She stared at him: her uncovered gold head
almost on a level with his own fair head, crested by that flyer's cap.
"Yes, rather!" continued the lad, definitely. "Now, what about it?"
He held out a hand to help her up the dunes, but she climbed as lightly
as he.
"What about it, please?" he repeated. "What about your belonging to me
for keeps, I mean?"
The girl had a curious little gesture as she looked at him, then away.
Surprise was in it, and protest, and a virginal dignity; also amusement,
unpreparedness, and wonder....
She repeated his words. "'Belong' to you? To you? Oh! No, I----"
"Don't you like me?" he shot out.
"Oh! I like you very well," she answered quickly, almost hurt herself by
the thought that she might have hurt him. "I like you so well! I like to
be with you. I like to talk to you. I--yes, I like to look at you," and
she turned one of her frank and friendly glances upon that handsome
figure striding by her side, that fresh face, all pink in the
sea-breezes. "But I guess I'd never want to 'belong' to any man!"
He smiled into the sweet bewildered eyes. It was the smiling side of his
obstinacy; obstinate and keen again, in love as in war!
"I say----How old are you?" he asked.
"Twenty-one," she told him.
"Well, then! You don't mind my asking, do you? Hasn't any man ever
wanted you to belong to him before?"
"You mean asked me to marry them?"
"Yes."
"Why, yes," she admitted with her crystal straightness. "Men, proposed
to me? Why, stacks of them! But they didn't do it that way."
She looked back and out to sea, as though she could see on the other
side of that severing Atlantic the half-score of her splendid young
countrymen who had offered her marriage as tribute is offered to a young
queen.
"You are--queer people over here," she said softly.
"Queer?"
"The way you talk of 'belonging.'"
"Queer, if it's the right man and the girl he wants?" Jack Awdas asked.
"But," she said, sweet and stately, "I should always want to belong to
myself."
Then he understood. He said quickly, "Of course I'd always want that for
you, too. But--oh, look here! Would the other stop that? As I see it, it
might help it."
The puzzled wonder grew in her look. All this was strange to her; she
had read of it, heard of it. All this was unexpectedly different from
books, from college, from life until now. The old was so unexplored to
the new, embodied in its modern Diana. At twenty she had seen half the
capitals of two hemispheres, yet she was in his eyes more backward in
some ways than a girl who had never left her native village.
Mrs. Cartwright could have told her that it is by "belonging" that a
woman forms her individuality, and that it is only by giving that she
can either gain or keep what she has.
He went on softly talking. Presently he said, "I know now what people
mean by being made for each other. You were, for me. Yes, but I was for
you. Oh, yes. Oh, yes!... You can't tell me you honestly don't think
so.... You don't want to send me away; you don't want not to see me
again."
"Oh, _no_," she agreed, quickly, looking away from him as if to face a
situation. She was of the type that faces, losing no time in wondering
what she ought to think. And this was the very first time she had ever
wondered _what_ she thought.
She did like him. How it had grown, that first "fascination," born from
a look! But----At last she seemed to find the words that summed it up.
"This is a big thing," she said, gravely. "It might be the biggest thing
that's happened to me; but, Bird-boy, there's no hurry about it."
"No hurry?" He seemed to think that "hurry" was now the main point.
She shook her head. "We don't have to settle anything about it, right
here and right now. Now _do_ we?"
"Yes. _Yes!_" urged the boy.
"No," denied the girl's wise young voice. "See here; I'll be in London,
and you will be there in a month. There's plenty of time. You'll come
over then.... Then we can think of it.... Then maybe we'll talk of it
again...."
"Oh, will we," muttered Jack Awdas in a voice of utter
expressionlessness. For the moment he was ready to say nothing more.
Silence fell between them.
Each full of thought, they ascended and descended the belt of
softly-rolling dunes and came to where the sand had drifted half-way up
the trunks of the growing pines.
Suddenly Golden gave a little exclamation. "Oh, look; what's this?"
"What's what?" he asked, stopping beside her.
"I thought it was a cute little flower that was growing up the tree,"
said the girl with down-bent head, "but look, it's sown on to a ribbon,
and it's got itself wound way round the branch----"
She was disentangling the object that had taken her eye; a couple of
lengths of ribbon, faded to white by the sea breeze and stitched to a
little padded square of satin, once mauve, now pale as the sand.
"What is it?" she wondered.
Half-absently Jack Awdas caught hold of the other ribbon as he looked at
the thing.
And there was nothing to tell them what it was, the sachet of the
Disturbing Charm that had hung about Mrs. Cartwright's neck just before
she had plunged into the waters of Biscay Bay; the Charm that the wind
had caught and whirled away across the sands until at last it had been
in that pine branch from which a girl's hand unwound it.
[Illustration: _And there was nothing to tell them what it was, the
sachet of the Disturbing Charm._ ]
"Something from a wreck?" mused Golden.
The Charm dangled between them.
He was scarcely thinking of what he was doing as he twisted that ribbon
over his own fingers.
He was set, so that he would not have realized, now, that he had set
before. This was a universe away from that. _She_ knew that, the other
one.... She'd been kind.... It wasn't that she hadn't liked him, he
believed. She _had_ begun to like him near her, she _had_ liked it when
he said "darling." Ah, to think that he had ever wanted to say "darling"
to any woman before! Here was his darling, and she must be made to see
it, not later, not in London, but "right here and now."
As he twisted the ribbon, he spoke in the tone that had caused that
other woman to shut her eyes; for it was the note of the mating call.
"I say, darling----"
Again the girl shook her head, but--was there now the least quiver of
indecision in her gesture?
"I say, if nobody else has ever been allowed to call you that----"
"Oh, no!" she cried, sincerity itself.
He was mechanically twisting up that ribbon between them; another inch
he took, another.
"Then if there's nobody else you liked well enough for that, there's a
chance for me," persisted the soft husky voice of her lover above the
faint distant crashing of those breakers behind them.
"Shall I tell you what?"
"What----?" she asked, slowly, no longer looking at him. A kind of
arrogance seemed to shine up in him. Somewhere deep down in his heart he
was cheering himself on by the reminder that he knew more than she. He
seemed vaguely conscious of some force upon his side.... He would not
have believed anyone who had told him that a woman's strongest love,
poured out upon him, had lent him magnetism, charged him. He fastened
his blue eyes upon this girl, as upon some doggedly desired objective
seen from his battle 'plane as he drove through the blue, but he did not
reply. He smiled, with all that is far-away in those searching eyes of
his.
He had twisted up the last inch of that ribbon. Now he caught hold of
the Charm that hung between the two ties, then came to the twin ribbon
that she held. Before she knew what he would do with it, he wound that
ribbon about her fingers and palm, binding her hand to his own with the
Charm in it.
Close, close and warm his pulses beat to hers.
"I've caught you," he ventured, very softly, eyes intent upon her. He
smiled more broadly at the first faint dawning of lovely trouble in her
face. "Yes! This is what they'd call marriage-by-capture, I suppose?"
She didn't speak. She didn't move as he caught hold of her free hand as
well. He held his crested head gaily as he said to her, "Of course I'm
English and old-fashioned, and I know American girls are independent,
and I ought to see the things they could teach me! But there's something
I could teach one of them. Let me try?"
Softly he muttered the word which was to mean everything as his own name
for her. "Girl! _Girl!_ ... I say, let's learn from each other?"
Still she didn't speak. How find words, when at a nearness, a name, a
touch, some spell seems snapped and the meanings of all words thereafter
seem entirely to have altered? This stranger who had become her friend
so soon had even more quickly changed to----
"_What?_"
Her lover nodded, saying below his breath, "It will be all right."
Then, loosing one of her hands, he deftly unwound the ribbon that was
about the other. As he was stuffing the Charm with its ribbons inside
the breast of his flyer's coat, words came at last to his love.
Laughing tremulously, she asked, "Why, what are you doing that for?"
"Putting it by, safely," he smiled at her as he stood just a step away
from her on the sand. "It'll never leave me now, not that ribbon
that--that tied our hands together for me. I say, I shall fasten it to
my 'bus later on, to bring me luck, Girl. It's started already, what?"
He jerked his belt straight. "Hasn't it?"
And with the words he took that one step nearer that brought her into
his arms.
"Ah, please," he said, more softly than ever. "Please...."
He drew down to his shoulder the face so full of sweet disturbance, he
folded her close, close to the wide breast beneath the white-embroidered
wings. As if swayed by a Charm, she drew a long breath, then smiled in
wonder, nestled, and yielded to his kisses--the first for both of
them....
"What about America coming in now, Girl? She will, won't she?... Yes,
but say yes; you _must_! Say it!"
"No, Bird-boy! I just won't _say_ it," was her last touch of mutiny.
"And--and I guess we'll see about that 'belonging' later on."
"Yes," triumphed Jack Awdas. "I 'guess' so too!"
That was all those months ago.
CHAPTER IV
THE VOICE OF THE CHARMER
"She is singing an air that is known to me;
A passionate ballad gallant and gay,
A martial song like a trumpet's call."
Tennyson.
All that had been in November. It was now January--which brings me back
to the Phoenix Hut, where Golden van Huysen was preparing to sing.
Advancing to the edge of the platform, she said, smiling, but as quietly
as if she'd been proposing a game in a room full of children:
"What'll I sing you, boys?"
An instantaneous chorus of men's voices answered her, and she laughed.
Evidently she had heard, though Olwen hadn't caught a word of which song
it was they all wanted.
It was "the" sentimental song of the moment, that song whose name varies
from season to season. As I write, it is called differently from what it
will be called by the time you read. Once it was "Until," once "Roses of
Picardy." The soul of it remains the same. "Cheap and common," smile the
superior. Yes! Cheap as the air we breathe. Common as sunlight.
Golden van Huysen pronounced its present name to the accompanist, who
struck four cords on the piano. Then, into a dead silence, her voice
stole out.
It might have been the gushing of honey from a suddenly broken comb.
Already her speaking voice could set Olwen's heartstrings vibrating in
response to the sound, but Golden's singing voice (a rich mezzo-soprano)
was almost more than her little Welsh friend could endure for pleasure.
It cleft the middle of the note, the middle of the heart. Olwen sat, her
hands clenched under those furs, listening, listening. She could not
have told you what the words were about. She only knew that when the
immortal nightingale sang to his rose, it must be in some such song as
this.... The two verses of the song ended, and the applause that
followed them was as much a murmur of deep voices as it was a clapping
of hands from Americans, British tars, Canadian, kilties.... Without a
pause, the singer whispered to her accompanist. The wonderful voice rose
in a second song, of which the words might have been trivial, but which
were music because of their singer. Not a man or woman in that hut made
a movement.... In all she sang three songs.
Just before her last song she took a couple of steps backward, and
stood, tall and resplendent, between the two flags with a hand upon
each.
She had not sung three notes before the audience had risen to their
feet, with every soldier and sailor in the hall standing to attention.
For it was "The Star-Spangled Banner" that Golden van Huysen was singing
now.
There are some songs that never age. Of these are those a mother sings
to her child; of these, too, are those a Motherland sings to her absent
sons. This one----Well, all in that hall had heard it a thousand times
before, yet this might have been the first time. Golden sang it as once
Sims Reeves sang "Maud," as Patti sang "Home, Sweet Home"--in the
perfection of simplicity.
At the end she neither bowed nor smiled. She just backed out, as before
some Royalty of emotion, between the English and the American flags.
With a deep breath the audience felt that it was as though a light had
been put out....
It was this radiant personality of hers, as well as her power of holding
her hearers spellbound in hut, hospital, theatre, and soldiers' club,
that had gained her the name by which half London knew her now--"that
wonderful American they call the Sunburst Girl."
CHAPTER V
THE BEST GIRL-FRIEND
"She was Sweet of Heart."
Epitaph on the Tomb of an Egyptian Princess, 700 b.c.
Olwen, with Golden's furs, hurried through the billiard-room to the
outer hall with the "Enquiries" counter, the long bar, and the rows of
refreshment-tables crowded by soldiers and sailors.
One table was empty, reserved for Mr. Awdas's party, but the young
flying officer had been called away on duty just after his _fiancee's_
second song. Olwen was sorry for him, but his loss was her chance; and
she saw so little of this friend of hers.
As she handed over the great leopard-skin muff, she said, rather
appealingly, "Are you staying, Golden?"
"Why, aren't you?" Golden said, glancing towards the group who were
ordering coffee. "It's quite early."
"Yes; and I felt like a walk," said the other girl, wistfully, "and I
thought if we got out of this crush I might see you to speak to----"
Golden laughed. "Very well," she agreed. "I'll come with you; wait while
I shake hands with Mrs. Cartwright...."
The two young girls bade a quick good night to the party, and before it
was quite realized that they were leaving, they had passed through the
hall, descended the wooden staircase, and reached the entrance to the
Strand.
It was a clear and sparkling night above the murky lamp-glasses, with a
touch of frost. Away to the west the spoke of a single searchlight could
be seen creeping this way and that like a snail's horn.
The tall girl and the little one turned to take the quieter streets in
the direction of Baker Street, Olwen's terminus.
Already they had walked many a mile together, those oddly contrasted
girl-friends, during that growth of this quick, firm friendship. Several
times the Welsh girl had been invited to the big house near Grosvenor
Gardens, which was Golden's home; the little house at Wembley Park had
in its turn welcomed the American. There had been appointments for
matinees together, and for lunch. Olwen, in fact, would have wished to
claim the Sunburst girl whenever Jack Awdas was out of town, bound for
France with a new machine. Taking aeroplanes across the Channel was now
his job. Little Olwen had been the first of her girl friends to whom
Golden had confided the pact on Biscay Beach that had made of her
Bird-boy the happiest man flying.
But as Golden was not of the type that lets any Third (however dear)
into details that concern a happy two, Olwen had never heard of the part
played in that scene by a trifle of pink ribbon and satin in which her
own hand had bestowed a Charm....
If she had known of it, it might have been better for her. It might have
startled her out of the lines that her own life was taking; humdrum
lines, she knew--she scarcely realized that they were also growing
towards the lines of disillusionment, even of cynicism. Being gloriously
in love was a thing for the few, she thought. Certainly a bright fixed
star seemed to shine over this girl by her side and over the Jack she
appeared to adore. But what gleam of it touched the life of Olwen? She
had now reached twenty, and the phase when a girl believes herself to
have outgrown everything she ever used to feel. Certainly she had
gained, by that casting off of some of her feverish emotionalism and
credulities, but was there nothing this young girl was in danger of
losing?
It was as they were turning into Cranbourne Street that Golden van
Huysen, who had been swinging along without speaking, did startle her by
a sudden remark:
"Olwen! I didn't know you could be so cruel."
Quickly Olwen's little head went up. "Cruel, Golden? What can you mean?"
"I mean just plain cruel. What made you say good night in the way you
said it, as if you didn't care if it were good night, or good-bye, or
good riddance?"
"'Good night' to whom? I spoke to Mrs. Cartwright; she was the one who
mattered," Olwen said a little defensively. "All those other people from
the Honeycomb----well, I wanted to get away with you, and I see _them_
every day."
"And are '_they_' all the same to you?"
"Of course," said Olwen in a resigned voice, "you _mean_ Captain Ross."
"Certainly I didn't mean your little Major Leefe, who talks as if it
hurt him, not your young sailor-boy, who loves to laugh."
"Well, I see Captain Ross every day, and I expect he thinks that's far
too much."
Golden's reply was a soft laugh. "Oh, you British, you are the funniest
things! Either you want to grab a thing before you take another breath,
or else you wait staring at it until you can't see it!----Why, Olwen,
that man's crazy about you."
"Not he!" returned Olwen, decidedly, and with another sort of laugh--a
slightly bitter one.
For she had just remembered that this was the second time some one had
thought this thing. She heard again the mercilessly shrewd voice of that
French manageress at Les Pins.
"_Monsieur le Capitaine, he with the one arm, who admires
Mademoiselle._"
She, Olwen, had actually been silly enough to believe it, then. She
didn't believe it now; how could she? Did she have any reason? Those
Fridays were the only time she saw him to speak to, and even those, as
he'd practically pointed out to her, were the purest accident.
The rest of the time--she laughed again.
"My _dear_ Golden, if you could _only_ see him at the Honeycomb!"
And there seemed to resound in her mind echoes of Captain Ross's voice
at the Honeycomb--or were they echoes of Mrs. Newton's mimicries of
Captain Ross?
"Hullo--yes?" curtly down the telephone in his office where Olwen had
come for instructions. "Yes; Miss Howel-Jones _is_ working on the
Honeycomb. You will find her number in room 0369----" Then, in an iron
tone to Olwen, "Miss Howel-Jones, I should be glad if you would give
your _correct_ telephone number to any friends whom you wish to ring you
up...."
And so on. Was that the manner of a man who cares?
More echoes were broken in upon by the gentler voice of Golden.
"I don't need to see him at any Honeycomb. I saw it in one, at the Eagle
Hut. If he's different in the office, why, that's his fine sense of
duty, and you ought to like him for that.... Jack thinks a deal of
Captain Ross. So does Mrs. Cartwright, and she's a real, intelligent
woman. Why, do you know, just before Captain Ross came on to the meeting
tonight, your little friend Mrs. Newton said something about him; I
think she likes to make fun of him a little. Mrs. Cartwright said, quite
quietly, '_I have a great affection for Captain Ross!_'
"I guess she wouldn't have said that without some reason for liking him.
Jack thinks he's fine," young Awdas's sweetheart concluded her plea for
the absent. "Don't you like him, Olwen?"
There was a silence as the two girls walked up Tottenham Court Road,
comparatively empty at this time of the evening.
Then Olwen drew a quick little breath, turned up her face to her
friend's, and let out an emphatic "I did like him." Then in a soft hurry
of words, "I liked him all that time in France. Yes. Awfully! I thought
of him and thought of him, Golden. It seemed to make everything ...
beautiful to me." Then a little ashamed laugh, "I was----silly, then!"
"Silly?" repeated her friend gently. "That's not the way it seems to
me. That's a lovely thing in a girl's life." She lifted her chin over
the leopard-skin stole and looked ahead to the stars above the murky
lamps, to the skies in which lay her own lover's pathless way. "Make
everything beautiful; that's what love should do. I _know_," said
Golden, shyly, but proudly. "I didn't know for certain, until Jack
showed me. I'm so pleased you know too...."
"Oh, but--that's not new," Olwen protested quickly. "That's over."
"Over? Then--if you don't mind telling me, what do you feel about
Captain Ross now? What does he mean in your life?"
Little Olwen had asked herself this very same question until she'd given
it up, and now she scarcely knew whether to laugh or to shrug her
shoulders.
"I'll tell you," she said lightly, after a moment, "exactly how I feel
about Captain Ross. I would have told you before, if you'd asked me. To
start with, I work all day at the Honeycomb, where there are hundreds of
other girls, and men. Some of these people amuse me, and some don't,
so----"
"But----'_amuse_'----" repeated Golden, blankly. "Does that stand for
anything big?"
The soft Welsh voice of the other girl retorted, "It does, when you are
working, and--and there isn't anything else. Isn't it natural that one
likes the amusing people best? Mrs. Newton is amusing. Major Leefe
doesn't mean to be, but he is. Mr. Ellerton is nice to go about
with----"
Again Golden broke in gently. "Olwen! I don't like to hear you talk that
way."
"Why not? Les Pins is over. And when a thing's over," pronounced this
sage of twenty, "sensible people don't waste any more time on it."
"When you say that, it seems to me to be belittling a very----" Golden
made the characteristic American pause after the adverb--"beautiful
thing."
"It's different for you who have one man meaning the whole world to you.
As I haven't. Well, I want to be amused, Golden."
More gently still Golden repeated, "I don't like to hear you talk that
way, Olwen. Don't you feel any more that Captain Ross is different from
the others?"
"I feel he's less amusing," declared the girl, walking beside her.
"And how," asked Golden, "does that young Mr. Ellerton 'amuse' you,
then?"
"Well, he gives me a good time. I like being with him. He rattles away
all the time. _He_ doesn't snap my head off----"
For half a minute there was silence as they walked along. Then Golden
stopped by one of those dimly-gleaming lamps and peered down into her
friend's small, mutinous face; her voice dropped a whole note as she
said slowly:
"Olwen! You wouldn't do such a thing as play Mr. Ellerton off against
Captain Ross to make Captain Ross jealous?"
"Oh, no," Olwen said quite honestly; forgetting something as entirely as
a change of mood can cause one to forget. She had mischievously enough,
allowed Captain Ross to go on thinking that the young R.N.A.S. officer
had held her hand.... She didn't even care enough to remember it....
But at her answer the American girl heaved quite a sigh of relief.
"Forgive me," she begged. "Forget I said that. I ought to have known it
wasn't like you."
And here Olwen really felt herself humbled by the standards of the
straight young goddess at her side. For the first time the younger, less
womanly but more feminine and complex girl suffered a pang of remorse on
account of a certain little Mr. Brown. Him she had certainly made use of
at Les Pins to annoy Captain Ross. The blackberry time was not
intentional; but that time on the terrace? Would Golden ever have talked
to a young man "at" another young man? It would be better, she knew, if
every girl could think and act like Golden ... it would be better....
But to every girl her problems.
Golden went on, "You've done it without wanting to, then. He was scared
tonight that Mr. Ellerton would sit by you. You aren't out to make him
jealous, but have you wondered if he thinks that's what you're doing?
I've told you that he watched every look of yours!"
"But I don't believe it," persisted Olwen, feeling somehow more
disturbed, less contented with life as it was then she had been that
day. "Why should I?" and into her voice there crept another note.
It was a note of unspoken irritation, exasperation, and appeal. In how
many soft girl voices does it not sound, telling of budding emotions
nipped by the frost of silence--of hopes that had grown tired of raising
their heads--of womanly impulse turned back upon itself--of influences
that might have made the sunshine of two lives, but that dies of
forbiddance because some man has shown himself so near to
speaking----and has not spoken!
"He cares," said Golden with the conviction of some young great-eyed
oracle.
A passer-by separated the two girls for the moment. As they came
together again Olwen retorted, "Then why can't he say so? Men do, when
they like a girl well enough. Your Jack did, in a minute."
Golden gave a happy little laugh. "But, as I say most every day, you
British are so queer! You're so different! Some of your men want to
propose before they even say 'Pleased to meet you.' Others seem to have
this habit of waiting and waiting until some cows of their own come
home, I guess."
"It's the second sort that I don't understand," sighed the Welsh girl.
"If a man is fond of a girl, why doesn't he want to say so at once?"
Golden shook her head. "Now that is something that I can't tell you."
Presently Olwen said, as if getting rid of something that had been a
little on her mind, "I read in a book of essays about engagements and
things, that Mrs. Newton lent me, that '_a Proposal was one-half the
Engineering of Some Girl, and one-half the False Pretences of Some
Man_' ... but I hope that's not quite true...."
"It is not true," said the American girl serenely. "It's ugly."
With this profoundly simple remark, uttered as if it were some creed,
she turned with Olwen down Warren Street; and they were half-way to
Baker Street station before either of them spoke again.
Then said the Sunburst Girl, "I wouldn't have missed this walk. I think
you needed to talk to somebody who knows Love's lovely."
"Somebody who seems to upset things I thought were _settled_," grumbled
Olwen, affectionately.
"That's why I'm glad I came with you. I just hate to see you in a hurry
to settle all the wrong things!"
Olwen persisted. "For the umpteenth time, as Mr. Ellerton would say,
that man doesn't care two-pence about me, Golden."
"Just because he hasn't proposed?" smiled Golden as she took the last
word. "But he will. Watch out for it. Good night, dear."
The heavy furs lifted to her gesture as she turned, then swung away
under the stars towards the South.
CHAPTER VI
THE CHARM REMEMBERED
"A is happy, oh, so happy!
A is happy, B is not."
Gilbert.
The words of Golden remained with her friend all the way back to Wembley
Park, down the Drive of little red-roofed villas, and up the
short-flagged path between the standard rose-bushes that led to her
Aunt's front door.
Olwen took her latch-key from her bag and let herself in; as she did so
she heard the voice of the Aunt from the sitting-room, "Is that you,
dear?"
"Yes! I'll be down in a minute," she called back, and ran straight
upstairs to the bedroom with the pink-curtained window that overlooked
the back lawn.
She wanted to be alone for a moment or so. She had just told the
Sunburst Girl that what she wanted was amusement, but what she would
have liked now would have been solitude.
Why had Golden unsettled her again like this, when she had been getting
along so cheerfully?
She sat down on the edge of the springy brass-railed bed drawn up
against the window. It was open, and the breeze stirred in the curtain
behind her head, full of uneasy thought.... As she drew the hat-pins
from her head she glanced restlessly about her room, bright, girlishly
pink-and-white, with the atmosphere of a room that had been lived in
happily enough. Mechanically Olwen's eyes fell upon the dressing-table,
upon the crystal powder-box, upon the signed photograph of Professor
Howel-Jones--about the frame of which there was twisted a long piece of
pink ribbon, sewn to----
Why, it was that half-forgotten Charm of her days in France!
Half scornfully she smiled now at the memories that it brought to her.
It seemed another Olwen that she remembered, poring over typewritten
directions for the use of that Charm.... Fancy an Olwen who believed in
that! What a simple way out of the problems of Love, to wear a mascot
and to have everything happen that one could wish!
This did happen to some people, Olwen mused. To Golden van Huysen it had
come without the help of any talisman. Golden possessed within her all
that quality of Charm of which that "inventor" claimed to have found the
secret. She was one of the lucky people who hold that secret without
knowing what it is....
But as for materializing it into something that might be annexed and
worn----well, thought the new and more sophisticated Olwen, what had
been the success of that, so far? Half laughing now, she considered it.
That other, romantic little Olwen had (in her first enthusiasm!) written
to that newspaper address for more of the Charm.
No answer had been vouchsafed to her.
Therefore her experiments had been limited to four. She had planted out
her Charm upon four people: Miss Agatha Walsh, Mrs. Cartwright, little
Mr. Brown, and herself.
With what results?
This older, wiser Olwen ticked them off now on her fingers.
_One_, Agatha Walsh--successful. She had become engaged to her Gustave
and was perfectly happy.
_Two_, Mrs. Cartwright--unsuccessful. Absolutely nothing had happened,
thought Olwen, vexedly; her friend the writer had received not one word
of added attention from her Uncle, and had remained unclaimed except by
that work and those boys of hers.
_Three_, little Mr. Brown--more than unsuccessful. Not only had he
failed to attract anybody on his own account, but he had shown symptoms
of becoming attracted to a girl who didn't want him.
_Four_, Herself--unsuccessful again. No results at all. You can't count
as "results" two attacks of masculine dog-in-the-mangerishness, one box
of chocolates, a few ragging remarks, and an evening of having one's
hand held in a boat. No results....
That left one out of four cases in which the Charm had worked. _Only one
out of four people lucky in Love!_ Was it so the world over? One in four
meant a quarter of the people in the world!... Well, perhaps that wasn't
such a very poor percentage, Olwen told herself more briskly as she gave
herself a little shake out of her meditations and ran downstairs to the
sitting-room, where a cup of cocoa and a plate of those neutral objects
known as War-biscuits had been set ready for her by the Aunt.
This Aunt was Professor Howel-Jones's youngest sister, a small demure
woman of forty-five, with the air of constantly saying, "Of course _I_
am the failure of the family." She had been left a widow very young,
and it was her pose to give out that she had never been asked to marry
again. But her pretty eyes laughed, most disconcertingly, while the rest
of her face remained prim. She smoked, sang Clarice Mayne's songs and
forbade Olwen to call her "Aunt" anything.
"Thank you, Lizzie," said her niece, as this lady handed her over a
letter that had arrived by the last post. Then, glancing at the
signature, Olwen gave a little exclamation of surprise. It was over the
well-known type of coincidence that brings a letter from some one almost
immediately following one's own thoughts of that some one.
For the letter was signed, "Yours affectionately, AGATHA WALSH."
Miss Walsh wrote from Paris, where she had just been having "Oh, such a
lovely time shopping with Madame Leroux, who had taken a month away from
the hotel, and had been looking up some of the relations----"
Followed an account of these relations who had evidently taken the
English _fiancee_ to their bosoms; Agatha, who had been English and
provincial, was rapidly becoming a good French _bourgeoise_.
She went on, "Oh, and there is such news, Olwen. Figure to yourself that
Gustave is coming to London with General Chose next week! Coming as his
orderly! Just think how lovely for me! Of course I shall come over at
once. I have not been in England since September! We must all meet, we
and you and the Professor and dear Mrs. Cartwright, if she is in town!
And won't it be like old times again! and oh, Olwen, I may even be
getting married----"
This last word was so heavily underlined that Olwen had to laugh, and
the Aunt asked her what she was so pleased at.
"Oh, only that there _are_ some very happy people in the world even
now," said Olwen.
"'Some' pessimist", murmured the Aunt, whose vocabulary was not of her
epoch. "Never mind, Olwen; I have just remembered something. An admirer
rang you up on the telephone this afternoon, and would you ring him up
at the Regent Palace Hotel as soon as you came in----?"
"What?" said Olwen, astonished. "What was his name, and why d'you think
he was an admirer, Lizzie?"
"I think he admired you by the tone of his voice, in which he said,
'Miss Olwen,'" said the demure Aunt, who had a private and vicarious
delight in watching all the activities of her young niece. "As for his
name----what was it now? Something rather out of the way."
"I don't know," wondered Olwen. "Was it Mr. Ellerton?"
"Oh, no; not our young Naval man who finished our last drop of whisky,
by the way--no, I thought at once of him, dear, but it wasn't. It
was--oh, yes! He said, '_Ask her to ring up Lieutenant Brown_.'"
"What? _Not_ Little Mr. Brown?"
"I couldn't tell you what height he was," murmured the Aunt, but already
Olwen, amused, had run out into the hall and had taken up the telephone.
(Coincidence, then, had been busying itself with another of the Les Pins
party!)
After some little delay the Regent Palace found Mr. Brown.
"Hul-_lo!_" the familiar boy's voice sounded over the wires as cheerily
as it had sounded over the waves and through the pine woods. "That you,
Miss Olwen?... That's great. How are you?... That's top-hole.... Me? Oh,
I'm fine, thanks. Yes; I'm up for a Board. I say, Miss Olwen, when can
we for-gather?... Can I see you tomorrow?... Dinner? What are you
doing?"
Olwen said, "I'm going to a party at Mrs. Cartwright's----"
"No! By Jove, are you? I say, I'm glad you mentioned it. I nearly
forgot. I'm booked for Mrs. C. too. Rang her up and she asked me to roll
up at seven. Can I take you along? Miss Olwen, can't I have tea with you
in town somewhere first?"
"Er----" began Olwen, doubtfully. Truth to tell she had not wanted to
see very much of little Mr. Brown; she had not wished to encourage his
boyish sentimentality for her.
He took up quickly, "Won't you have tea with me, here, tomorrow? I've
got something very particular to say to you, Miss Olwen."
"Oh? What is it?"
"Give you three guesses. I say, you know that mascot you gave me?"
"Yes?"
"Well! It's brought me luck, I reckon."
"Oh, has it? Well, what is it?"
"That's what I want to talk about tomorrow," came with a joyous giggle
from the other end of the wires; evidently the speaker could scarcely
wait until tomorrow's talk. "I say, can't you guess, Miss Olwen?
Master's got off, this time."
"Got _what_?"
"_Off!_"
"I can't quite hear what you say," called Olwen, puzzled. "Who has got
what?"
"Oh, spare my blushes," begged the voice of Mr. Brown, and then brought
out the announcement, "I'm engaged to be married, Miss Olwen, that's
what!"
"Oh--_oh!_" gasped Olwen. "I'm so glad----"
"Thanks! Thought you would be! You wait till you hear all about it
though. You prepare for a shock, Miss O. Tea tomorrow. Four o'clock.
That suit you? I'll meet you at the door--you know, in the hall just in
front of the big place where all the animals feed. Right! So long!
Chin-chin!"
"Good night!" called Olwen, and rang off. Then she stood gazing at the
telephone almost as if it were the small figure in khaki coming towards
her out of the forest.
Engaged----Little Mr. Brown!
The Charm had worked with him, then, after all?
That made two out of four....
Well, that was a better percentage than she had thought she might hope
for, thought Olwen as she turned away.
Did it mean that after all _half_ the people in the world were lucky in
love?
CHAPTER VII
PETROL AND THE CHARM
"For your own ladies, and pale-visaged maids,
Like Amazons, come tripping after drums;
Their thimbles into armed gauntlets change,
Their needles to lances."
Shakespeare.
"I've got a table in the corner over here," said little Mr. Brown to
Olwen through the buzz of talk that drowned all but the louder strains
of the band in the tea-room of the Regent Palace Hotel.
It was, as ever on a Sunday afternoon, a welter of khaki and girls. The
wicker chairs could not be seen for shrubberies of furs, coloured forest
of millinery; there was scarcely a space on the floor clear of muffs,
vanity bags, and feet; big feet in brown boots, little feet in
high-heeled coloured shoes; swathed feet in hospital wrappings. It took
Mr. Brown and Olwen minutes to steer their way through this labyrinth to
the further corner by a window that the little campaigner had marked
down and engaged just after lunch.
"Now, that's better," he said. "Nobody will come and walk over us here,
and nobody can hear what I say through this racket, not that I care if
they do.... Well, it's nice to see you again, Miss Olwen. I've been
fairly bursting to have a good old mag with you, ever since all this
happened.... What? Yes, two teas, please, Miss, if you can call 'em
teas. Spelling it with an E at the end is nearer the mark nowadays;
sort of reminding you of what once was tea. I've got some sugar here;
pinched some out of HER cupboard yesterday--good start, wasn't it? Are
you one of those people who miss lump sugar with every breath they draw,
Miss Olwen?"
Olwen smiled into the pink, pug-dog face that looked pinker, more
pertinacious than ever; the boy held his head even more assuredly in the
air, but his blue, prominent eyes were humble as well as joyous, and the
whole of him radiated amazement at Fortune as well as delight.
"Tell me about 'all this,'" Olwen begged, and little Mr. Brown zestfully
drawing in his chair and letting a pleased grin crumple his cheeks,
broke into his story....
Here and there Olwen interposed a question, a "Really," a "Why," a "What
did she say to that?" but for the rest she listened mutely as a woman
must, with the widening of her eyes, with a nod, a turn of the attentive
head, while the cheerful boy's voice--a thread in that closely woven
pattern of other voices all about them--ran on and on.
"It was only last Saturday it started. Imagine that! Seems ages ago to
me now, so much happening.... However, to begin at the beginning. I'd
been to my Board in the morning, and the silly old blighters had given
me another three weeks' leave before putting me on light duty. I was in
a taxi, coming away from them, because I was in a hurry, promised to
meet a fellow I knew for lunch at the Troc....
"By Jove, I never even rang him up after! I've only just thought of that
fellow who used to be in the Lace Department at that old show of mine,
and I hadn't seen him since '14. Too bad. I'll have to write him. Anyhow
I can't help it; absolutely everything seems to have gone straight out
of my head.
"Well, I was going to lunch with this fellow, and then I thought after
that I'd ring you up, Miss Olwen, and see what you were doing, and if
you'd perhaps care to come with me to the Alhambra or something. If I
couldn't get hold of you I was going to look up Ross, I thought, and
Mrs. Cartwright.... This was where I was mapping out things that came
rather different, as it happened!
"We were coming along Piccadilly towards the Circus when my taxi-man (an
absolutely dud driver, as I'd noticed) barged straight into a
motor-cycle and side-car that were going along at no end of a lick for
Knightsbridge. He only pulled up in the very nick of time; the cycle and
the rider were over and into the mud; a filthy day it was, p'raps you'll
remember--drizzling and the streets like a soap-slide.
"Out I nipped, before the crowd had even begun to collect, and picked up
the motor-cyclist with one hand, and started saying what I thought of
the taxi-driver with the other--he was swearing away like a trooper at
'these here so and so and so and so side-cars'; and the little nipper
who had been upset was cursing him to blazes, an octave higher. The
voice took me by surprise, of course.... The little thing was so covered
in mud that I couldn't have told you off-hand if it were a boy or girl
or a retriever dog.
"A girl; yes, it was a girl, of course.
"One of those lady dispatch-riders, they call them. Cap like mine,
trench-coat down to her knees, top-boots, riding-breeches ... laughing
all over her little splashed face....
"Well, in about two twos I'd pushed his fare at the taxi-driver and sent
him off and was assessing the damages to that motor-cycle of
hers--nothing wrong at all luckily! while she wiped her face on a huge
khaki handkerchief and put her cap straight. Short hair, of course,
rather sticking out, curly.... I always thought I loathed short hair on
a girl. Suits her A1, and it's most awfully soft and jolly to run your
fingers through....
"What? Oh, no, not _then_. Give us a chance. I wasn't allowed a chance
to touch her hair for ages--you'll see.
"All this time I was being all over myself with apologies, and she
laughing and saying it was all part of the day's work, only the taxi-man
had put her back up; taxi-drivers did always seem to be women haters!
She told me (standing there by the kerb) that she was just coming off
anyway before her three days' leave that she gets in a month, and that
she was dashing up to Harrod's before they closed, because she was on
duty from eight to six ordinarily, and never got any time to do any
shopping for herself.
"(Mind you, that's the only grouse she seems to have at all after doing
a man's job day in, day out; no time to get her shopping done!)
"I thought to myself at once, the way one does, 'H'm, here's a nice
little bit of skirt, if you could see it for mud.' Not that it _wore_ a
skirt, but still. So I said, pretending to be rather fed, 'I don't
suppose there's another taxi to be had for love or butter now, so I'll
just push on to Harrods' on my flat feet.'
"'Oh,' she says, 'were you going to Harrods'?'
"'I am,' said I, determined to now, anyway.
"'And you're wounded, too, aren't you,' says she. 'I'll give you a lift.
Hop in.'
"In I hopped into that side-car; and off we buzzed to Harrods', and we
were just in time before they closed for her to buy half a dozen pair of
the best quality brown silk stockings for herself. (I'd seen she was a
lady, you know, and all that.) She said she hadn't a stocking left to
her foot----Tiny feet she's got, Miss Olwen! Reminded me of yours,
honest, they did. Same sort of hands, too. Coming out of her great
gauntlets like snowdrops, growing in a drift of brown leaves----No, I
didn't make that up, that's what she told me some ass of an old Colonel
that she used to drive the cars for said to her once. I think it's neck,
the way some of those old Johnnies with one foot in the grave go on
giving the Glad to any pretty young girl that's near them....
"Well, after Harrods' shut, we went on to some place where she could get
a wash and brush up, and we had a spot of lunch together. She was a real
jolly little thing to go about with, I thought. We sat talking--you know
the way ones does--until it was nearly tea-time.
"Tea we had out, too. She would stand me tea, said it was her shout, and
because I was wounded. Seemed to think that because a fellow had been
pipped once he was helpless for evermore. Generally I loathe women
fussing over one for that, but she was different.... Struck one as so
comic, you know, that tiny little thing with those hands and feet to be
got up like any old mechanic, and to do all that hefty work in all
weathers----and for her to get frightened that I might be tired!
"Well, so we went to Rumplemayer's.
"Afterwards I went with her to take her bike back to the Park. You know
she's attached to the Royal Flying Corps there; yes, that's what she
does now. Carries their letters and messages for them all over the show,
to your people at the Honeycomb too, sometimes. Sometimes she drives out
officers to the various training schools for flying, all about. Has to
clean her own bike, too! Wouldn't let me give her a hand, said it didn't
look well. Extraordinary, the lot she gets through!... And I used to
hate girls being 'independent,' too.
"I asked her what put it into her head to do all this, and she said it
was because one had to do one's bit somehow, and the harder the better,
so that it sent one to bed tired enough to sleep.
"Dashed sporting little girl I thought her.
"It was dinner-time before I knew, and I asked her if she'd come out. (I
had got just one pound note left on me!)
"She said, as naturally as if we always fed together, 'Shall I go up to
my rooms and get into respectable clothes, or d'you mind if I came in my
uniform?'
"I said, 'Oh, come along!' And we went off to a quiet little place at
the back of the Palace.
"By that time, d'you know, I felt as if I'd known that little girl for
years and years and years.
"She seemed just like the best little pal a man could have. We
talked--oh, about any old thing. I sort of felt at home with her. So she
did with me. She told me so. But it was me that did most of the
talking. Only, what d'you think? We never bothered to ask each other's
names. That was the funny part. I'd told her all about me being in a
shop before the War----Lace, forward----and how I thought of having a
shot at in Canada, p'raps, and all that sort of rot. Miles I'd yapped to
her; even about my mother dying when I was a nipper....
"I wonder the girl wasn't bored stiff. I can't make out now why she
wasn't. However, as I say, they might never have named this child N or M
for all she was given to hear about _that_.
"Fact was, I clean forgot about names until I took her home----she's got
two rooms in one of those big old-fashioned houses in a street off Baker
Street. Then, as I said good night to her on the doorstep, I said, 'Oh,
by the way, who do I ask for tomorrow?'
"She said, 'Coming tomorrow?'
"I said, 'Well, you told me it was your three days' leave, and I thought
p'raps you'd come for a walk'----thinking to myself that I might be able
to raise another quid or so for meals from some man at the Regent
Palace, which I was.
"'Oh,' she said, with a little sort of laugh. 'Rightoh. And I haven't
told you, of course, my name's Robinson,' she said as she went into the
house; big dark hall, it seemed to swallow her up.
"I said, 'Brown's mine,' and off I went----and I couldn't simply get the
little thing out of my head all night, and what a jolly little chum she
was. Don't laugh at me, Miss Olwen; no, I know you're not really
laughing, but I am, I can tell you. 'They laugh last who laugh laughs,'
as that chap says at the Hippodrome.
"Next morning I was round at that house so early that I hadn't the nerve
to ring the bell. I had to patrol the street for another half an hour
before I rang.
"'Miss Robinson?' says I to the old girl who opened the door, but before
she could answer I could hear the little girl herself singing out over
the banisters, 'Hullo, I think I know that voice! Come up, Mr.
Brown----'
"I legged it up to the first floor. Her sitting-room door was open;
well, in I went, and there I got a nasty one."
Here Mr. Brown stopped to draw a breath, to finish his cooling tea, and
to offer a cigarette to Olwen, listening with all her ears. There is no
audience to a love-story so intent and so satisfactory as the girl to
whom one has been attracted. Curiosity as to her supplanter burns in the
breast of the woman whether or no she had been attracted to the man;
curiosity made of varied elements--sympathy is one, and competition is
one, and the undying yearning to compare notes is another....
Little Mr. Brown went on.
"Well, it was a pretty room, full of sun in the morning. Pretty coloured
curtains and cushions about; and lots of flowers and that yellow bobbly
thingummybob scented stuff--mimosa. And then.... Her in the middle of it
all----_all different...._
"I stopped dead and stared at her, never even saying good morning. Miss
Olwen, I can tell you it was a shock to me.
"Last night, you see, I'd left her looking like a saucy little tomboy in
that khaki working kit of hers with a cap the same as my own on her
head and a black-and-white badge of the R. F. C. on her shoulder, and
those brown riding bags....
"This morning here she stood all in a dead-black frock, with a widow's
hat on and a long black veil streaming away from her little face.
"I stared, I tell you. I saw the situation absobloominglutely changed,
in one.
"'Good Lord,' I said, 'you've been married?'
"She opened her eyes at me and said, 'Why shouldn't I?'
"I looked at her, such a little woman in her girl's clothes, but taller
than she seemed in t'other rig-out, and I said, 'I didn't know you were
married. I thought you were a kid of a girl. A widow. You didn't tell
me.'
"'You didn't ask me,' she says. 'You might have seen I wore a
wedding-ring. Men never do seem to notice rings--or anything else, I
can't think why.'
"I stood there like a silly ass and said, 'I never thought of you being
married. I s'pose I only looked at your face----'
"And I suppose I'd been magging so hard all yesterday about myself that
I hadn't given the girl a chance to put her life history across me!
"She told me then, all quickly as I stood there, that she'd been married
last year to her cousin, just before he went out. He was in the Flying
Corps. He crashed in France just three months after they'd been married.
Then she joined this Women's Legion. (You know they're jolly particular
who they let into it, Miss Olwen: have to have no end of refs. from
_padres_ and lawyers and people.) She threw herself into her job....
She'd been working like a nigger ever since....
"All I could think to say was 'Well, this knocks me out.'
"She laughed and asked me why it should make any difference, her being
Mrs. Robinson instead of Miss? She asked me if I didn't like her in
those things she'd got on? She said, 'Most people think it's rather
becoming, all this black.'
"It made her little face look like a wild rose coming out of a
coal-bucket, but what could I say to her? I tell you I was so flummoxed
I stood there like a stuck pig--I don't know what I said next; honest, I
don't.
"So then she offered me cigarettes, and I took one in a sort of dream,
and felt all over myself for matches. Couldn't find any.
"Only, then----
"D'you know what I found, Miss Olwen? Blessed if I didn't stick my
fingers into my belt pocket here, and feel something soft. I brought it
out. It was that little mascot of yours. She asked me quickly what it
was.
"'Oh,' I said, 'something a girl put there once, to bring me luck,' and
I stuck it back again.
"'Oh,' she said. I saw her looking at that pocket.
"Then she said, 'What about going for that walk we've heard so much
about?'
"'Right you are,' I says, pulling myself together. 'I'm ready if you
are, Mrs. Robinson.'
"Then she said, 'No; I'm not quite. I shall have to keep you five
minutes, not longer.'
"She popped through a door at the other end of the room and left me
gazing at a big photograph in a silver frame on her table with violets
in front of it. 'Yours, JIM,' on it. Him, of course. Fine-looking chap
in R. F. C. uniform. I didn't wonder she'd taken him. Anyhow, he'd had a
short life and a merry; a topping time! Marrying _her_, and then getting
shot down in action before he knew he was for it. I was envying him when
the door opened and in she came again----
"By Jove, she had done a quick change in five minutes and no mistake!
"She'd got out of the widow's weeds again and into khaki the same as
yesterday, except that there was nothing on her curls, and she'd put on
a short skirt and little brown brogues and a pair of those silk
stockings she bought yesterday; and she came straight up to me and said
quietly, 'Now, look here----why were you all upset when you came in?
What's put you out? My being a widow?'
"'No,' I said, straight. 'It wasn't just that, but never mind.'
"'Yes, let's have it out,' she said, and I looked at her standing there
in her khaki, but somehow I only saw her in a frock again, and I thought
to myself all in a rush, 'All right, you asked to have it out, and you
shall,' and so I just blurted out, 'It was seeing you, and knowing all
in a minute how much I wanted you myself--and remembering.'
"'Remembering what?' she says as sharp as a needle.
"And I said, 'My dear, I haven't a _bean_.'
"And I grabbed up my hat and gloves and I think I would have said
'Good-bye' and bolted.
"But she just looked at me so that I couldn't.
"Then she looked away and said, 'If beans are all that matter----!' and
then she picked a couple of violets out of the vase by that photograph,
and tucked them into her jacket, and, just like a kid, said, 'Jim always
loved me to have a good time. Jim would like me to have everything I
liked, I _know_ he would----'
"And here's where the room seemed to go round and round until it
steadied down with me holding her tight....
"Well, then, Miss Olwen----well, then, there we were; engaged! Or
practically then," amended little Mr. Brown, his pink face deepening in
hue. "It was hours after that that I began to grasp how little it
mattered about my not having anything but debts to ask any girl to marry
me on; why, great Scott, d'you know who she is? Her Uncle, her hubby's
father, is old Jack Robinson of Robinson and Mott; he's got the biggest
aeroplane-body business in the Midlands, and he, this Jim of
hers----well, she's got all he was to have. He arranged it so. She was
to marry again if she liked, and whom she liked. And----Well, she's a
girl who might have her pick; apart from the money. Then there's all her
money as well; and yet----yet----"
He paused for words just as the band at the other end of the tea-room
got the upper hand of the buzz of talk and sent a lilt of insistent
melody through the air above the parties.
"_Fancy you fancying me_" was the tune.
"Fancy you fancying me,
I can fancy anybody fancying you,
But fancy you fancying me."
"Incidental music; jolly appropriate," laughed little Mr. Brown,
happily. "What that girl could possibly see in your humble beats me. I
expect most people who meet us thinks she's balmy----"
But Olwen, smiling and interested and sympathetically murmuring, was
thinking again (secretly) of the Charm.
CHAPTER VIII
RATIONS AND THE CHARM
"A dinner of herbs where Love is."
Proverbs.
"If there is one thing that bores a man," gave out Captain Ross, in a
voice like the clashing together of Tube lift-gates--a tone that he had
adopted all that evening, since nothing seemed to be going right, "if
there is one thing that bores a man stiff, it's when some woman starts
in to '_Love_' him."
He paused to glance across the table at Olwen, gaily chattering with Mr.
Ellerton.
"It don't matter what woman," pursued the young Staff-officer
inexorably. "_Any_ woman. If he's keen before, that chokes him dead off.
He's not out for any of this Love-with-a-capital-L business that women
are such nuts on. Once he's done the chasing, he's gotten all he wants
out of it, I guess. Man's a hunter, Mrs. Cartwright."
"I know," cooed his hostess. Inwardly she exclaimed, "Dear Ass!... But
is he going on like this for the whole of my party?"
Up to then Captain Ross had only spoken to her and to the other young
Scotsman whom he had brought with him. At Olwen he had simply glowered.
At Miss van Huysen on the other side he had not looked.
"What's Love?" he continued, still to Mrs. Cartwright. "It's an
amusement. That's what it ought to be. An Episode. It's the Women who
insist on spoiling it; taking it seriously. Nothing in this world is
worth taking seriously; barring a man's job.... What's woman? The
Plaything of Man. And what's Marriage?"
It was, as he pronounced it, a word of one syllable.
"Marriage," he answered his own question, "is an idea that the sensible
man looks at from every angle, and then cuts right out until he can't
find anything better to do. If he is really a sensible man, he
invariably can find it."
"Ah," uttered Mrs. Cartwright with the little appreciative laugh of one
who hears for the first time an original thought brilliantly phrased.
But she wanted to be soothing; she was fond of Captain Ross. One does
not sob out one's weakness on a man's shoulder once and think of him as
a stranger thereafter. She had asked him to forget. She never forgot....
A pity he'd come in this absurd mood, she thought.
Her party, at her flat in Westminster, had arrived at the stage of the
feast when tongues were loosed and the young guests were gossiping and
chirruping in merry twos and threes.
Little Mr. Brown was beamingly loquacious in spite of the absence of his
khakied _fiancee_, kept out of town that evening on late duty. Between
Mr. Brown and the fresh-faced naval boy, Mr. Ellerton sat little Olwen
Howel-Jones, enjoying herself without disguise and looking her very
best. She was a girl who had "days"; this was one of them. Never had her
glossy black hair "gone up" so well, or her face lighted up so vividly;
never, against her pale skin, had her laughing mouth bloomed in such a
carnation-red. Never had any dress suited her so well as that flapper's
frock of succory-blue with touches of cream, and dull pink. It was the
frock Mrs. Cartwright had worn once on Biscay beach; she had pressed it
upon Olwen as she said good-bye at Les Pins, telling her it was a young
girl's colour after all. There Olwen sat in it now, laughing and being
talked to by two young men at once and looking a picture in it....
It was from this picture that Captain Ross's dark eyes looked so
pertinaciously away, as with new sardonic energy he informed Mrs.
Cartwright that by the time a man had learnt to handle women he'd learnt
that their place in his life was not all that important that he wanted
to handle them at all.
Mrs. Cartwright passed him the Sauterne.
"Thank goodness that there is at least enough to _drink_," she reflected
with a quick whimsical glance about the well-cleared dishes on her
supper-table that had held:
1. Remains of chicken, with an intolerable deal of
rice and curry to a very little fowl.
2. Allotment potatoes.
3. A pound of Normandy butter bought that morning
in Boulogne and brought over in Sergeant Tronchet's
haversack.
4. Pease-pudding.
5. Beetroot....
6. Green salad.
Well, they'd seemed to enjoy what there was.
"Ah!" exclaimed Mrs. Cartwright, here catching a remark from over the
table. "A penny from _you_, Mr. Brown!" And she pushed over to him a
money-box with the Blue Cross upon it, known as "The Fine-box."
This claimed a penny from whomsoever entering Mrs. Cartwright's abode
should make any allusion to a subject which she declared was now
inadmissibly boring: namely, food. One met quite intelligent people who
became hopelessly tedious about "recipes," "how they managed," and so
on. Rations had to be; and catering, food-cards, and substitute foods.
But why intensify the Unspeakable by unnecessary speaking about it?
Hence this box.
She took Mr. Brown's penny (a fine for some cheese anecdote or other),
rattled the box, and glanced, as usual without seeming to do so, at her
other guests.
Next to young Ellerton sat a niece of her own; a pretty girl in grey and
scarlet nursing kit; the red- and blue _artilleriste_ uniform of Gustave
Tronchet next; delighting the eyes of his _fiancee_ opposite.
Agatha Walsh had taken off years, Mrs. Cartwright thought, since they
had parted at Les Pins. In place of the "old-maid" look, she was
acquiring that of the young and prosperous woman--her smile seeming not
yet entirely her own, and she had a new gesture or two modelled on those
of Madame Leroux, her aunt-to-be. Also, her speech was altered. Some one
must have rallied her on her "English" habit of beginning every sentence
with "Oh"----Mrs. Cartwright missed it as she caught fragments of Miss
Walsh's talk to Jack Awdas, who sat on her left.
"Now could _you_ tell me, Mr. Awdas, the really best sort of man's wrist
watch?... I want to get a really _special_ one for Gustave--it is his
'_fete_' on Thursday ... not time to engrave anything, I'm afraid....
Ah, yes, if you could come with me on Monday, you and Miss van Huysen,
to help choose! That would be so amiable of you--nice, I mean. So
stupid of me. I _keep_ putting in the French words for things always,
now!
"Ah, a bracelet-watch like yours, that would be perfect....
"Was there a _cadeau de fiancailles_--let's see, what do you call it in
English, an engagement present?"
And she put her carefully dressed head on one side as she inspected the
watch that Jack Awdas, smiling, held out towards her. Jack was silent
this evening, Mrs. Cartwright had noticed already, as she noticed every
detail, still, of the young flyer's looks and manner.... He was in some
happy abstraction, she saw, worlds away from the brightly-lighted table
thronged with these young people chattering over their grapes and
oranges....
There was a light behind those horizon-blue eyes of his even when they
were not turned upon the sweetheart at his other side. There was an
undernote of something new and joyous in the tone of his voice as he
spoke to her.
("What _d'you_ think about it, girl?")
From the Sunburst Girl, as ever, a radiance seemed to emanate that was
more than the effulgence of her white-and-golden dress. But she, too,
was quieter than usual as she sat; now giving a little friendly smile to
her hostess across Captain Ross and his dogmas, now leaning to the right
and putting in a word about the matter of the engagement present.
("But, Bird-boy, if Miss Walsh _wants_ it in platinum----!")
Now turning her wide eyes affectionately upon the girl friend opposite
to her. Olwen was not flirting with the young sailor who talked so much
and had so little to say beyond his "Bai Joves" and "Ha's"; she was only
blooming in what Mr. Brown had already called "the sunshine of his
smile"; she was also caught in and made beautiful by some of that
happiness that flowed in a current about the table under the pink
inverted parasol of lights, flowed from Golden and her Jack....
Golden and Jack.... What pretty lover's secrets was between them now?
Still watching them covertly, Mrs. Cartwright could only wonder why,
since it was possible for young human beings to be grown so big and
beautiful--why in the name of a thousand pities did Nature turn out so
many samples of the stunted, the plain, the commonplace? Must this
well-matched pair stand for the exception rather than the rule? She
watched them, and that scene of physical perfection which had so nearly
brought Claudia Cartwright to shipwreck over a boy-lover was no longer
her torment, but her comfort.
She had wept all her tears; she had tossed sleeplessly through all her
hours of fierce rebellion; she had gone through the most agonizing
ordeal of her woman's life. But thank God it was over now....
It was over! and her eyes travelled now to that which is a woman's only
balm for such wounds as hers had been.
He sat, the master of the house, with a school-fellow between himself
and Agatha Walsh. This school-fellow was sixteen, a year older but three
inches shorter than young Keith Cartwright. Keith was already well over
six foot. Coltish at present, with great wrists shooting ever too
quickly beyond his cuffs, and feet that seemed four sizes too large for
his ankles, but wait until he began to fill out! thought Claudia
proudly. Her rightness of bone, her limbs, her suppleness had gone to
her boys; Reggie, on a visit in the country, was just as good, but it
was her elder son who seemed the child of her soul as well as of her
body. He had her tastes, her impatiences. Her own ardour would presently
be breaking into flame in his heart. She felt (as even the mute-bird
mothers feel) that she at least would not fail to understand him. She
smiled across the table into his face, pink and free of care, with its
clear eyes, thick lashes (those were from his father's side), and the
fruit-like, perfect oval that does not outlast twenty-five. She, the
mother, faded; but she had set in these young plants and they were
budding.
Keith's voice (or rather voices, for he himself never knew in what
octave his words might break forth) came roughly but affectionately
across the table to his mother.
"I say, mums! What about coffee----" so far in the bass, and now a
treble squeak of "if you don't mind. Harrison says he's got to get back
home, and I wanted to put on these new records"--relapse into the bass,
"for him first?... Rightoh...."
They had coffee before they adjourned to the sitting-room. It was a
low-ceilinged, soothing place with soft brown walls, low cushiony seats,
a richly-glowing Persian rug, some brass, and a few pictures. Mrs.
Cartwright's standing-desk at which she worked had been wheeled away
into a corner near an old oak coffer. Its place was usurped by the tall
stand of a gramophone. About this the young people clustered, talking
"records" ...
"I say, have you got that topping thing of George Graves's----?"
"Not a talking one; Miss Walsh wanted something _pretty_----"
"Well, what about 'The Naughty Sporty Girl,' Miss Olwen?"
"Bai Jove, did you hear him in----?"
"Heaps of room to dance, if----"
"Look out, please," said Keith Cartwright, lugging at a heavy flat
packet; and presently he put on a loud "selection" from some revue.
It was under cover of this music that Captain Ross who had been carrying
on with his Scots friend a conversation that seemed to consist of
variations on the letter R, suddenly left him in the middle of a
question as to the "Pairrrrrrrrrrsonnel" at the Honeycomb, and came up
to Awdas, who was making his way to a vacant place on the arm of the
couch whereon Golden was sitting.
With some force, Captain Ross gripped him by the upper arm. In the tone
of one who has been for hours storing up some accumulated grievance, he
muttered, "Say, Jack. I've got to have a word with you. _Now_," he
added, peremptorily, "Come out here, will you?"
CHAPTER IX
CHAMPAGNE AND THE CHARM
"Here's to the Wings of Love,
May they never moult a feather."
Toast.
Almost roughly he dragged Jack Awdas into the little entrance lobby,
where, under a couple of mounted ibex heads, a carved oak chest was
piled up with khaki caps, gloves, and British warms. The red silk-shaded
hanging-lamp glowed down on the two young men reflected in a convex
mirror on the other wall; Captain Ross's black head was therein enlarged
until his figure had the proportions of a tadpole; his face showed the
expression of a deeply-injured man, of one whom his friend had "let in"
for something uncalled-for and gratuitous.
"See here," he began abruptly. "I've got to tell you. There's something
I know that I don't know if I'm supposed to know."
Jack Awdas gave his husky boy's laugh.
"Well, dash it, there are a few things that a Captain on the staff is
supposed to know after all. '_Wearing red things round his hat, he's
employed at this and----_'"
"Don't rag, Jack. This thing's about _you_." Then, almost violently, "I
saw you this morning."
That red light glowed on a change in the fair one of the two faces as
the young flying officer looked down upon his friend, "I say, d'you
mean----?"
"Yep. I saw you."
Awdas, still startled, broke into another laugh. "Sorry, Ross. I didn't
mean to steal a march upon you, you know. But look here, old thing, how
the devil did you see me? You weren't there. Nobody was, ex----"
"I was in my office. Saw you all right from the window there."
"The deuce you did!... I say, if you let it get known about the
Honeycomb, that you've got a view like that, you'll have some of the
Mandarins snaffling that office of yours for themselves."
Captain Ross did not smile as he returned curtly, "There must be a dozen
of our windows looking, straight out on to the entrance to the Adelphi
Chapel."
Then a broad grin overspread Jack Awdas's fair face. "Well, is that all,
old thing?" he asked, tucking his handkerchief up his sleeve and making
as though he would turn back to the door, through which there rollicked,
but subdued, the strains of "Me and My Girl" put on very quickly.
"Weren't you going to congratulate me, Ross?"
Ross growled, "I guess a fellow doesn't want to put his foot into it by
throwing about congratulations for a secret marriage----"
"Secret? Good Lord, nothing secret about it," the other young officer
took up quickly, as he sat down for a moment on the edge of that
heaped-up chest. "Look here! We haven't told anybody about it because
there simply hasn't been time yet. When we came here tonight we were
going to tell you. We wouldn't put off Mrs. Cartwright; we were going to
come as if nothing had happened, and then make a wedding party of it;
tell you all, first thing. But how've I been able to get a word in?
First there was our gallant ally the Sergeant that everybody had to make
a fuss over in French, and then there was young Brown and his widow,
_that_ announcement! and then there was you----"
"_Me?_"
"Yes, you yarning away about what women were and what they weren't, and
if so why not. There hasn't been time to get a word in, man. Secret?" He
laughed joyously. "Why, I expect Golden's just telling Mrs. Cartwright
all about it now." The bridegroom crossed his long legs and grinned up
into the unresponsive face of this bachelor standing before him. "Yes;
this morning! I didn't see what there was to wait for ... here, have one
of mine. Golden thought it was a bit quick, but then so she did when I
wanted to be engaged to her, after three whole blooming days. Thought it
was _sudden_! That's----why, it's nearly four months ago. Anyway I said
to myself yesterday, 'This engagement's been dragging on long enough;
looks like lasting for ever'----so I got the license right away, wired
for my mother, broke it to Golden's governor, who has always been very
decent, and----Well, they were the only guests as far as I knew, never
guessing that you and the rest of the Honeycomb were gazing from the
windows at my girl in her veil and orange-blossoms. So now will you
congratulate me on my marriage?"
The face of the finest judge of marriage in Europe was a study.
* * * * *
For weeks past now, from the windows of cell 0638 at the Honeycomb,
Captain Fergus Ross had been accustomed to glance up from his desk and
to observe through the window various taxis, cars, or broughams drive up
to the door of the Adelphi Chapel.
He had seen young people and their friends alight in ceremonial kit. He
had watched them go in; and he had seen young couples presently come out
again, sometimes under arches of swords, sometimes under those of
crutches and walking-sticks, sometimes in a simple shower of confetti.
No doubt these sights had confirmed him in his misogynistic broodings.