|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 84
It was the girl who had to readjust her ideas of life that day. She
had been born and raised in that neutral ground between the lines of
right and wrong, and now suddenly her position was attacked and she
must choose sides. She chose.
"I've smoked a cigarette now and then. If you think it is wrong I'll
not do it any more."
He was almost overcome, both at the confession and at her
renunciation. To tell the truth, among the older Canadian officers
he had felt rather a boy. Her promise reinstated him in his own
esteem. He was a man, and a girl was offering to give something up
if he wished it. It helped a lot.
That evening he laid out his entire equipment in his small cabin,
and invited her to see it. He put his mother's picture behind his
brushes, where the other one had been, and when all was ready he
rang for a stewardess.
"I am going to show a young lady some of my stuff," he explained.
"And as she is alone I wish you'd stay round, will you? I want her
to feel perfectly comfortable."
The stewardess agreed, and as she was an elderly woman, with a son
at the front, a boy like Cecil, she went back to her close little
room over the engines and cried a little, very quietly.
It was unfortunate that he did not explain the presence of the
stewardess to the girl. For when it was all over, and she had stood
rather awed before his mother's picture, and rather to his surprise
had smoothed her hair with one of his brushes, she turned to him
outside the door.
"That stewardess has a lot of nerve," she said. "The idea of
standing in the doorway, rubbering!"
"I asked her," he explained. "I thought you'd prefer having some one
there."
She stared at him.
II
Lethway had won the ship's pool that day. In the evening he played
bridge, and won again. He had been drinking a little. Not much, but
enough to make him reckless.
For the last rubber or two the thought of Edith had obsessed him,
her hand on the rail as he had kissed it, her cool eyes that were at
once so wise and so ignorant, her lithe body in the short skirt and
middy blouse. He found her more alluring, so attired, than she had
been in the scant costume of what to him was always "the show."
He pondered on that during all of a dummy hand, sitting low in his
chair with his feet thrust far under the table. The show business
was going to the bad. Why? Because nobody connected with it knew
anything about human nature. He formulated a plan, compounded of
liquor and real business acumen, of dressing a chorus, of suggesting
the feminine form instead of showing it, of veiling it in chiffons
of soft colours and sending a draft of air from electric fans in the
wings to set the chiffons in motion.
"Like the Aurora," he said to himself. "Only not so beefy. Ought to
be a hit. Pretty? It will be the real thing!"
The thought of Edith in such a costume, playing like a dryad over
the stage, stayed with him when the dummy hand had been played and
he had been recalled to the game by a thump on the shoulder. Edith
in soft, pastel-coloured chiffons, dancing in bare feet to light
string music. A forest setting, of course. Pan. A goat or two. All
that sort of thing.
On his way down to his cabin he passed her door. He went on,
hesitated, came back and knocked.
Now Edith had not been able to sleep. Her thrifty soul, trained
against waste, had urged her not to fling her cigarettes overboard,
but to smoke them.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|