"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.
"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 Phœnix 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 Phœnix 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.
"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.
"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 firstdéjeunerhad 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 notkind!"
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-manfascinatedher.
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, butthisflyer....
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 firstfightingflyer 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 thatbefore 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 thatSHEwould 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 wonderedwhatshe 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. Nowdowe?"
"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.
"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.Sheknew that, the other one.... She'd been kind.... It wasn't that she hadn't liked him, he believed. Shehadbegun to like him near her, shehadliked 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; youmust! Say it!"
"No, Bird-boy! I just won'tsayit," 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.
"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.
"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 Phœnix 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."
"She was Sweet of Heart."Epitaph on the Tomb of an Egyptian Princess, 700 b.c.
"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 hisfiancée'ssecond 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 matinées 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 seethemevery day."
"And are 'they' all the same to you?"
"Of course," said Olwen in a resigned voice, "youmeanCaptain 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.
"MydearGolden, if you couldonlysee 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-Jonesisworking 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 yourcorrecttelephone 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. Iknow," 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.Hedoesn'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 weresettled," 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.