The Best Short Stories of 1917 Part 83

"Not for Leila," Standish declared. "Life's for her a quest of joy."

"That's it," d.i.c.k interposed. "Her adventures have all been joyous."

"But they haven't," Leila insisted. "I'm no spoiled darling of the G.o.ds.

I've been poor, poor as that girl out there. I've had heartaches, and disappointments, and misfortunes."

"Not vital ones," d.i.c.k declared. "You've never had a knock-out blow."

"She doesn't know what one is," Standish laughed, but there sounded a ruefulness in his laughter that told of the kind of blow he must once have suffered to bring that note in his voice. Standish Burton took life lightly, except where Leila was concerned. His manner now indicated, almost mysteriously, that something threatened his harbor of peace, but the regard Leila gave to him proved that the threat of impending danger had not come to her.

"Oh, but I do know," she persisted.

"Vicariously," I suggested. "All artists do."

"No, actually," she said.

"You're wrong," said Standish. "You're the sort of woman whom the world saves from its own cruelties."

There was something so essentially true in his appraisal of his wife that the certainty covered the ba.n.a.lity of his statement and kept d.i.c.k and myself in agreement with him. Leila Burton, exquisitely remote from all things commonplace, was unquestionably a woman to be protected.

Without envy--since my own way had its compensations in full measure--I admitted it.

"I think that you must have forgotten, if you ever knew," she said, "how I struggled here in London for the little recognition I have won."

"Oh, that!" d.i.c.k Allport deprecated. "That isn't what Stan means. Every one in the world worth talking about goes through that sort of struggle.

He means the flinging down from a high mountain after you've seen the glories, not of this world, but of another, the casting out from paradise after you've learned what paradise may mean. He spoke with an odd timbre of emotion in his voice, a quality that puzzled me for the moment.

"That's it," said Standish, gratefully. "Those are the knock-out blows."

"Well, then, I don't know them"--Leila admitted her defeat--"and I hope that I shall not."

Softly she began to play the music of an accompaniment. There was a familiar hauntingness in its strains that puzzled me until I a.s.sociated them with the song that Burton used to whistle so often in the times when Leila was in Paris and he had turned for companions.h.i.+p to d.i.c.k and to me.

"I've heard Stan murder that often enough to be able to try it myself,"

I told her.

"I didn't know he knew it," she said. "I heard it for the first time the other day. A girl--I didn't hear her name--sang it for an encore at the concert of the Musicians' Club. She sang it well, too. She was a queer girl," Leila laughed, "a little bit of a thing, with all the air of a tragedy queen. And you should have heard how she sang that! You know the words?"--she asked me over her shoulder:

"And because I, too, am a lover, And my love is far from me, I hated the two on the sands there, And the moon, and the sands, and the sea."

"And the moon, and the sands, and the sea," d.i.c.k repeated. He rose, going to the window where Leila had stood, and looking outward. When he faced us again he must have seen the worry in my eyes, for he smiled at me with the old, endearing fondness and touched my hair lightly as he pa.s.sed.

"What was she like--the girl?" Standish asked, lighting another cigarette.

"Oh, just ordinary and rather pretty. Big brown eyes that seemed to be forever asking a question that no one could answer, and a little pointed chin that she flung up when she sang." d.i.c.k Allport looked quickly across at Burton, but Stan gave him no answering glance. He was staring at Leila as she went on: "I don't believe I should have noticed her at all if she hadn't come to me as I was leaving the hall. 'Are you Mrs.

Standish Burton?' she asked me. When I told her that I was, she stared me full in the face, then walked off without another word. I wish that I could describe to you, though, the scorn and contempt that blazed in her eyes. If I had been a singer who had robbed her of her chance at Covent Garden, I could have understood. But I'd never seen her before, and my singing wouldn't rouse the envy of a crow!" She laughed light-heartedly over the recollection, then her face clouded. "Do you know," she mused, "that I thought just now, when the girl was singing on the street, that I should like to know that other girl? There was something about her that I can't forget. She was the sort that tries, and fails, and sinks. Some day, I'm afraid, she'll be singing on the streets, and, if I ever hear her, I shall have a terrible thought that I might have saved her from it, if only I had tried!"

"Better let her sort alone," Burton said, shortly. He struck a match and relit his cigarette with a gesture of savage annoyance. Leila looked at him in amazement, and d.i.c.k gave him a glance that seemed to counsel silence. There was a hostility about the mood into which Standish relapsed that seemed to bring in upon us some of the urgent sorrows of the city outside, as if he had drawn aside a curtain to show us a world alien to the place of beauty and of the making of beauty through which Leila moved. Even she must have felt the import of his mood, for she let her hands fall on the keys while d.i.c.k and I stared at each other before the shock of this crackle that seemed to threaten the perfection of their happiness.

From Brompton came the boom of the bell for evensong. Down Piccadilly ran the roar of the night traffic, wending a blithesome way to places of pleasure. It was the hour when London was wont to awaken to the thrill of its greatness, its power, its vastness, its strength, and its glory, and to send down luminous lanes its carnival crowd of men and women. It was the time when weltering misery shrank shrouded into merciful gloom; when the East End lay far from our hearts; when poverty and sin and shame went skulking into byways where we need never follow; when painted women held back in the shadows; when the pall of night rested like a velvet carpet over the s.p.a.ces of that floor that, by daylight, gave glimpses into loathsome cellars of humanity. It was, as it had been so often of late, an hour of serene beauty, that first hour of darkness in a June night with the season coming to an end, an hour of dusk to be remembered in exile or in age.

There should have come to us then the strains of an orchestra floating in with the fragrance of gardenias from a vendor's basket, symbols of life's call to us, luring us out beneath stars of joy. But, instead, the bell of Brompton pealed out warningly over our souls, and, when its clanging died, there drifted in the sound of a preaching voice.

Only phrases clattering across the darkness were the words from beyond--resonant through the open windows: "The Cross is always ready, and everywhere awaiteth thee.... Turn thyself upward, or turn thyself downward; turn thyself inward, or turn thyself outward; everywhere thou shalt find the Cross;... if thou fling away one Cross thou wilt find another, and perhaps a heavier."

Like sibylline prophecy the voice of the unseen preacher struck down on us. We moved uneasily, the four of us, as he cried out challenge to the pa.s.sing world before his voice went down before the surge of a hymn.

Then, just as the gay whirl of cars and omnibuses beat once more upon the pavements, and London swung joyously into our hearts again, the bell of the telephone in the hall rang out with a quivering jangle that brought Leila to her feet even as Standish jumped to answer its summons.

She stood beside the piano as he gave answer to the call, watching him as if she expected evil news. d.i.c.k, who had moved back into the shadow from a lamp on the table, was staring with that same searching gaze he had bestowed on her when she had lingered beside the window. I was looking at him, when a queer cry from Standish whirled me around.

In the dim light of the hall he was standing with the instrument in his hands, clutching it with the stupidity of a man who has been struck by an unexpected and unexplainable missile. His face had gone to a grayish white, and his hands trembled as he set the receiver on the hook. His eyes were bulging from emotion and he kept wetting his lips as he stood in the doorway.

"What is it?" Leila cried. "What's happened, Stan? Can't you tell me?

What is it?"

Not to her, but to d.i.c.k Allport, he made answer. "Bessie Lowe is dead!"

I saw d.i.c.k Allport's thunderstruck surprise before he arose. I saw his glance go from Standish to Leila with a questioning that overrode all other possible emotion in him. Then I saw him look at Burton as if he doubted his sanity. His voice, level as ever, rang sharply across the other man's distraction.

"When did she die?" he asked him.

"Just now." He ran his hand over his hair, gazing at d.i.c.k as if Leila and I were not there. "She--she killed herself down in the Hotel Meynard."

"Why?" Leila's voice, hard with terror, snapped off the word.

"She--she--I don't know." He stared at his wife as if he had just become conscious of her presence. The grayness in his face deepened, and his lips grew livid. Like a man condemned to death, he stared at the world he was losing.

"Who is Bessie Lowe?" Leila questioned. "And why have they called you to tell of her?" Her eyes blazed with a fire that seemed about to singe pretense from his soul.

His hand went to his throat, and I saw Leila whiten. Her hand, resting on the piano, trembled, but her face held immobile, although I knew that all the happiness of the rest of her life hung upon his answer. On what Standish Burton would tell her depended the years to come. In that moment I knew that she loved him even as I loved d.i.c.k, even as women have always loved and will always love the men whom fate had marked for their caring; and in a sudden flash of vision I knew, too, that Burton, no matter what Bessie Lowe or any other girl had ever been to him, wors.h.i.+ped his wife with an intensity of devotion that would make all his days one long reparation for whatever wrong he might have done her. I knew, though, that, if he had done the wrong, she would never again be able to give him the eager love he desired, and I, too, an unwilling spectator, waited on his words for his future, and Leila's; but his voice did not make answer. It was d.i.c.k Allport who spoke.

"Bessie Lowe is a girl I used to care for," he said. "She is the girl who sang at the Musicians' Club, the girl who spoke to you. She heard that I was going to be married. She wanted me to come back to her. I refused."

He was standing in the shadow, looking neither at Leila nor at me, but at Standish Burton. Burton turned to him.

"Yes," he muttered thickly, "they told me to tell you. They knew you'd be here."

"I see," said Leila. She looked at Standish and then at d.i.c.k Allport, and there came into her eyes a queer, glazed stare that filmed their brightness. "I am sorry that I asked questions, Mr. Allport, about something that was nothing to me. Will you forgive me?"

"There is nothing to be forgiven," he said. He turned to her and smiled a little. She tried to answer his smile, but a gasp came from her instead.

"Oh, I'm so sorry," she said, "so sorry for her!"

It was Standish's gaze that brought to me sudden realization that I, too, had a part in the drama. Until I found his steady stare on me I had felt apart from the play that he and d.i.c.k and Leila were going through, but with his urgent glare I awoke into knowledge that the message he had taken for d.i.c.k held for me the same significance that Leila had thought it bore for her. Like a stab from a knife came the thought that this girl--whoever she was--had, in her dying, done what she had not done in life, taken d.i.c.k Allport from me. There went over me numbing waves of a great sense of loss, bearing me out on an ocean of oblivion. Against these I fought desperately to hold myself somewhere near the sh.o.r.e of sensibility. As if I were beholding him from a great distance, I could see d.i.c.k standing in the lamplight in front of Leila Burton.

Understanding of how dear he was to me, of how vitally part of me he had grown in the years through which I had loved him--sometimes lightly, sometimes stormily, but always faithfully--beaconed me insh.o.r.e; and the plank of faith in him, faith that held in itself something of forgiving charity, floated out to succor my drowning soul. I moved across the room while Standish Burton kept his unwinking gaze upon me, and Leila never looked up from the piano. I had come beside d.i.c.k before he heard me.

He looked at me as if he had only just then remembered that I was there.

Into his eyes flashed a look of poignant remorse. He shrank back from me a little as I touched his hand, and I turned to Leila, who had not stirred from the place where she had listened to Standish's cry when he took the fateful message. "We are going," I said, "to do what we can--for her."

She moved then to look at me, and I saw that her eyes held not the compa.s.sion I had feared, but a strange speculativeness, as if she questioned what I knew rather than what I felt. Their contemplating quiet somehow disturbed me more than had her husband's flashlight scrutiny, and with eyes suddenly blinded and throat drawn tight with terror I took my way beside d.i.c.k Allport out from the soft lights of the Burtons' house into the darkness of the night.