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Page 80
The steamer had picked him up at Halifax--a cold dawn, with a few
pinched faces looking over the rail. Forgive him if he swaggered up
the gangway. He was twenty-two, he was a lieutenant, and he was a
fighting man.
The girl in the story saw him then. She was up and about, in a short
sport suit, with a white tam-o'-shanter on her head and a white
woolen scarf tucked round her neck. Under her belted coat she wore a
middy blouse, and when she saw Lieutenant Cecil Hamilton, with
his eager eyes--not unlike her own, his eyes were young and
inquiring--she reached into a pocket of the blouse and dabbed her
lips with a small stick of cold cream.
Cold air has a way of drying lips.
He caught her at it, and she smiled. It was all over for him then,
poor lad!
Afterward, when he was in the trenches, he wondered about that. He
called it "Kismet" to himself. It was really a compound, that first
day or two, of homesickness and a little furtive stirring of anxiety
and the thrill of new adventure that was in his blood.
On the second afternoon out they had tea together, she in her
steamer chair and he calmly settled next to her, in a chair
belonging to an irritated English lawyer. Afterward he went down to
his cabin, hung round with his new equipment, and put away the
photograph of a very nice Toronto girl, which had been propped up
back of his hairbrushes.
They got rather well acquainted that first day.
"You know," he said, with his cup in one hand and a rather stale
cake in the other, "it's awfully bully of you to be so nice to me."
She let that go. She was looking, as a matter of fact, after a tall
man with heavily fringed eyes and English clothes, who had just gone
by.
"You know," he confided--he frequently prefaced his speeches with
that--"I was horribly lonely when I came up the gangway. Then I saw
you, and you were smiling. It did me a lot of good."
"I suppose I really should not have smiled." She came back to him
with rather an effort. "But you caught me, you know. It wasn't
rouge. It was cold cream. I'll show you."
She unbuttoned her jacket, against his protest, and held out the
little stick. He took it and looked at it.
"You don't need even this," he said rather severely. He disapproved
of cosmetics. "You have a lovely mouth."
"It's rather large. Don't you think so?"
"It's exactly right."
He was young, and as yet more interested in himself than in anything
in the world. So he sat there and told her who he was, and what he
hoped to do and, rather to his own astonishment, about the medals.
"How very brave you are!" she said.
That made him anxious. He hoped she did not think he was swanking.
It was only that he did not make friends easily, and when he did
meet somebody he liked he was apt to forget and talk too much about
himself. He was so afraid that he gulped down his tepid tea in a
hurry and muttered something about letters to write, and got himself
away. The girl stared after him with a pucker between her eyebrows.
And the tall man came and took the place he vacated.
Things were worrying the girl--whose name, by the way, was Edith. On
programs it was spelled "Edythe," but that was not her fault. Yes,
on programs--Edythe O'Hara. The business manager had suggested
deHara, but she had refused. Not that it mattered much. She had been
in the chorus. She had a little bit of a voice, rather sweet, and
she was divinely young and graceful.
In the chorus she would have remained, too, but for one of those
queer shifts that alter lives. A girl who did a song and an
eccentric dance had wrenched her knee, and Edith had gone on in her
place. Something of her tomboy youth remained in her, and for a few
minutes, as she frolicked over the stage, she was a youngster,
dancing to her shadow.
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