She did not cry, not at first. The time came when it seemed to her she did nothing else. But at first she only stared. She was too young and too strong to faint, but things went gray for her.
And gray they remained--through long spring days and eternal nights--days when Mabel slept all morning, rehea.r.s.ed or played in the afternoons, was away all evening and far into the night. She did not eat or sleep. She spent money that was meant for food on papers and journals and searched for news. She made a frantic but ineffectual effort to get into the War Office.
She had received his letter two days after she had seen his name among the missing. She had hardly dared to open it, but having read it, for days she went round with a strange air of consecration that left Mabel uneasy.
"I wish you wouldn"t look like that!" she said one morning. "You get on my nerves."
But as time went on the feeling that he was dead overcame everything else. She despaired, rather than grieved. And following despair came recklessness. He was dead. Nothing else mattered. Lethway, meeting her one day in Oxford Circus, almost pa.s.sed her before he knew her.
He stopped her then.
"Haven"t been sick, have you?"
"Me? No."
"There"s something wrong."
She did not deny it and he fell into step beside her.
"Doing anything?" he asked.
She shook her head. With all the power that was in her she was hating his tall figure, his heavy-lashed eyes, even the familiar ulster he wore.
"I wish you were a sensible young person," he said. But something in the glance she gave him forbade his going on. It was not an ugly glance. Rather it was cold, appraising--even, if he had known it, despairing.
Lethway had been busy. She had been in the back of his mind rather often, but other things had crowded her out. This new glimpse of her fired him again, however. And she had a new quality that thrilled even through the callus of his soul. The very thing that had foredoomed her to failure in the theatre appealed to him strongly--a refinement, a something he did not a.n.a.lyse.
When she was about to leave him he detained her with a hand on her arm.
"You know you can always count on me, don"t you?" he said.
"I know I can"t," she flashed back at him with a return of her old spirit.
"I"m crazy about you."
"Old stuff!" she said coolly, and walked off. But there was a tug of fear at her heart. She told Mabel, but it was typical of the change that Mabel only shrugged her shoulders.
It was Lethway"s shrewdness that led to his next move. He had tried bullying, and failed. He had tried fear, with the same lack of effect. Now he tried kindness.
She distrusted him at first, but her starved heart was crying out for the very thing he offered her. As the weeks went on, with no news of Cecil, she accepted his death stoically at last. Something of her had died. But in a curious way the boy had put his mark on her. And as she grew more like the thing he had thought her to be the gulf between Mabel and herself widened. They had, at last, only in common their room, their struggle, the contacts of their daily life.
And Lethway was now always in the background. He took her for quiet meals and brought her home early. He promised her that sometime he would see that she got back home.
"But not just yet," he added as her colour rose. "I"m selfish, Edith. Give me a little time to be happy."
That was a new angle. It had been a part of the boy"s quiet creed to make others happy.
"Why don"t you give me something to do, since you"re so crazy to have me hanging about?"
"Can"t do it. I"m not the management. And they"re sore at you. They think you threw them down." He liked to air his American slang.
Edith cupped her chin in her hand and looked at him. There was no mystery about the situation, no shyness in the eyes with which she appraised him. She was beginning to like him too.
That night when she got back to Mabel"s apartment her mood was reckless. She went to the window and stood looking at the crooked and chimney-potted skyline that was London.
"Oh, what"s the use?" she said savagely, and gave up the fight.
When Mabel came home she told her.
"I"m going to get out," she said without preamble.
She caught the relief in Mabel"s face, followed by a purely conventional protest.
"Although," she hedged cautiously, "I don"t know, dearie. People look at things sensibly these days. You"ve got to live, haven"t you?
They"re mighty quick to jail a girl who tries to jump in the river when she"s desperate."
"I"ll probably end there. And I don"t much care."
Mabel gave her a good talking to about that. Her early training had been in a church which regarded self-destruction as a cardinal sin.
Then business ac.u.men a.s.serted itself:
"He"ll probably put you on somewhere. He"s crazy about you, Ede."
But Edith was not listening. She was standing in front of her opened trunk tearing into small pieces something that had been lying in the tray.
VII
Now the boy had tried very hard to die, and failed. The thing that had happened to him was an unbelievable thing. When he began to use his tired faculties again, when the ward became not a shadow land but a room, and the nurse not a presence but a woman, he tried feebly to move his right arm.
But it was gone.
At first he refused to believe it. He could feel it lying there beside him. It ached and throbbed. The fingers were cramped. But when he looked it was not there.
There was not one shock of discovery, but many. For each time he roused from sleep he had forgotten, and must learn the thing again.
The elderly German woman stayed close. She was wise, and war had taught her many things. So when he opened his eyes she was always there. She talked to him very often of his mother, and he listened with his eyes on her face--eyes like those of a sick child.
In that manner they got by the first few days.
"It won"t make any difference to her," he said once. "She"d take me back if I was only a fragment." Then bitterly: "That"s all I am--a fragment! A part of a man!"
After a time she knew that there was a some one else, some one he was definitely relinquishing. She dared not speak to him about it.
His young dignity was militant. But one night, as she dozed beside him in the chair, he reached the limit of his repression and told her.
"An actress!" she cried, sitting bolt upright. "_Du lieber_--an actress!"
"Not an actress," he corrected her gravely. "A--a dancer. But good.
She"s a very good girl. Even when I was--was whole"--raging bitterness there--"I was not good enough for her."