CHAPTER VIII
MOONSHINE EFFECTS
I
Dale Conway paused, and glanced at his wrist-watch. In England men wear wrist-watches as a matter of masculine custom, and despise watch-chains as effeminate: in America the converse holds good. A wrist-watch upon an American man is—or was in those days—a target for rugged mirth. But the audience in The Breakers Ballroom gave no sign. The Spellbinder from Way Back had justified his own jesting description of himself.
He looked up again, and smiled disarmingly.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I observe that I have bored you for nearly an hour. This must stop. I must stop!’
There was dissent here—quite sincere dissent.
‘But I must say one word more. It is this. I am profoundly moved by the manner in which you have helped me along to-night; and I want to say so. An Englishman can never say “”thank you!” prettily, and he knows it; so sometimes he omits the formality altogether. Please remember that fact next time an Englishman treats you abruptly: remember that he is dying to make a pretty speech, but can’t. For my part, I will content myself by saying the bare words, in the sure and certain belief that you will read into them the genuine emotion that lies at the back of them.’ Conway's voice shook a little. ‘Thank you!’
There was a sympathetic stir throughout the room. Geraldine Tilford, ecstatic behind a potted palm, dabbed her eyes.
‘I have kept my tale, continued Conway in a steadier voice, ‘as simple as possible, because I know that simple truth is what you want at a time like this. I have avoided technicalities; I have avoided politics; and in particular I have avoided anything in the shape of partisan statement, because I am well aware that I stand upon neutral soil, addressing a strictly neutral audience.’
There was a ripple of laughter. Here at last was an Englishman with a sense of humour.
‘So I have confined my discourse to a simple theme that lies very near my own heart—the theme of that very effectually disguised knight errant, Thomas Atkins. That is why I have labelled my lecture ‘Human Nature at the Front’—because Tommy is the most human person that I know. I have tried to depict for you his experiences during an average round of twenty-four hours in the trenches. Perhaps I have toned down the horrors a little, and exaggerated the humour; but to an American audience—the quickest audience in the world, by the way—it is sufficient to indicate without elaborating. The British Tommy, especially the old Regular, is an inarticulate person; he would be embarrassed to the point of profanity if he knew we were talking about him now; but—well, he has saved England; and England means a good deal to some of us here present.’
The applause broke forth again.
‘What he has done will probably never be known to the world, because to a great extent the memory of his achievements will be obscured and overlaid by greater achievements still to come—the achievements, for the most part, of other people. What people, I need not specify. But’—for the first time the speaker's voice rose above conversational level, and his hands were stretched towards his audience in a gesture of entreaty—‘I want to make a little appeal to you. When the great day comes; when the miracle of peace is vouchsafed to us again, and the glory and the praise are duly bestowed, as they always must be, upon those who are in at the finish, I ask that you will pay in your hearts some small tribute of remembrance to those vanished legions of nameless men who stood up to the first rush, and by their sacrifice paved the way for your victory.’
Conway's hands fell to his sides again, and he sank, like a man suddenly weary, into his chair, behind the flag-draped table. There were tears in his eyes.
Next moment the audience were on their feet, cheering, waving, weeping. When the most impulsive and the warmest-hearted nation in the world is touched to the quick, it is not ashamed to say so. It was five minutes at least before Mr. Storey, the chairman, was able to obtain a hearing. That youthful septuagenarian had plainly reached the point at which he had to make a speech or suffer serious internal injury. He had introduced Conway to his audience with commendable brevity. Now his moment had come. He rose to his feet.
‘In England,’ he began, ‘they have a custom, after a speaker has spoken his piece, of awarding him a vote of thanks—but only in the accepted British fashion. That is to say, the motion is first proposed and seconded, usually at some length; after that it is put to the meeting, and if any one present feels like opposing it he is perfectly at liberty to do so. Finally, along towards bedtime, the proposal is confirmed by the audience, and the speaker goes home happy in the knowledge that, whatever has been awarded to him, nothing short of an Amendment to the British Constitution can take it away from him!’
There was a general laugh of appreciation of this exactly right note. Conway led it.
‘But I should hate,’ continued the old gentleman, ‘to be responsible for instituting any procedure of that kind here to-night. In fact, it would be impossible. We are a young nation, and an impulsive nation, and a susceptible nation; and when a man gets us right where our hearts live, as Captain Conway has got us to-night—well, there is only one thing to do, and that is to award the vote of thanks first and propose it afterwards.’
The company promptly took the speaker at his word, and the vote of thanks was awarded for some minutes. John Storey turned to Conway.
‘You hear that, Captain Conway?’ he said. ‘It is yours—all yours—and you deserve every bit of it, and more. I am not going to spoil it by adding any verbal embroidery.’ He turned to the audience again. ‘But before I sit down,’ he said, ‘I desire in particular to thank Captain Conway for two things. In the first place, he has not told us to get into the game; and in the second, he hasn’t talked about himself. We all know here that we ought to be in the game—’
There was another great shout.
—‘and we should not have resented it if Captain Conway had told us so—coming from him, of course. Also, we should have been intensely interested to hear some of the Captain's own personal experiences in the War. But he did not give them to us. On the whole, I’m glad, in both cases. If he had given us fireworks, we should no doubt have enjoyed them; but what he gave us was the quiet restraint and curiously effective understatement of an English gentleman; and that was what we were looking for. In our hearts we Americans cherish a picture of the ideal soldier—the man who is both modest and brave. Such men have been fighting our battles for us over there for more than two years. But now’—the old man’s voice rang out exultantly—‘we are going to reinforce them—reinforce them with men of like pattern to themselves—men speaking the same language—men burning to make up for lost time and lift some of that intolerable burden from the shoulders which have borne the whole of it too long.’ He turned suddenly, and laid an impulsive hand upon Conway's shoulder. ‘Captain Conway, if you listen carefully, you will hear the tramp of armed thousands beginning to vibrate upon our soil. To-day they are still a long way behind you; but to-morrow they will be shoulder to shoulder with you; and presently, if I know the spirit of the American boy, all you will be able to see will be a small cloud of dust upon the horizon in front of you! God bless you, and God bless all of us!’
And the old man sat down—spent, radiant, and entirely happy for the first time since the invasion of Belgium.
II
There was no mistaking the impression that Conway had created. As the audience dispersed to the further preoccupations of the evening—roulette, dancing, supper, or bed—there was but one opinion. The lecture had contained nothing strikingly new nor in the least sensational, as sensations went in those hectic days; but its modest delivery and its tactful consideration of American susceptibilities—and America, being the youngest, is the most sensitive country in the world—combined with the lecturer's own attractive personality, had struck deep. Orchids, as Miss Studfield would have said, were the order of the day.
‘That’s a type of man, Colonel,’ announced Mr. Storey, still aglow, ‘that only England can produce. Don’t you agree, Mrs. Wynne?’
‘Well, I’m not so sure,’ said Mrs. Wynne, with her lazy smile. ‘I’ll admit he's a clever man. He knows our national weaknesses, and he tickles us just where we like to be tickled. But I wouldn’t call that a universal British characteristic. Would you, Colonel Winter?’
‘Five years in the diplomatic society of Washington have convinced me of the mournful truth of your suggestion, Mrs. Wynne,’ said Winter. ‘Still, I thought Conway made an admirable speech.’
‘As soon as I get back to New York,’ said Mr. Storey, ‘I’m going to take Carnegie Hall for him; and if I can fix things right, it will be a turn-away. Will you be there, Colonel?’
‘We’ll send somebody from the Embassy, be sure,’ said Winter. ‘Good-night, and good-bye. My leave is over, and I’m off to Washington by the night train.’
‘When you get there,’ said Mr. Storey, as he shook hands, ‘oblige me by putting a bullet into .’
He mentioned the name of a prominent native politician notorious for pacifism of a windy and tearful brand, and departed reverberatingly, in search of Mrs. Wynne's rolling chair. Winter, after a not very hopeful survey of the immediate landscape, walked off by himself in the soft moonlight, rather forlornly.
He was a bachelor, though not from choice. In love he was a better stayer than starter, and once before in his life—in India—he had been forestalled by a readier opponent. He had realised during the past fortnight that history was about to repeat herself, in Palm Beach. Hence the night train to Washington. Still, he was a just man.
‘Damned good propaganda,’ he said to himself—‘damned good, whoever the fellow is! I liked him better to-night. There were moments when he seemed absolutely pukka. He’s certainly more convincing on a platform than in a drawing-room; the hairy heel is less conspicuous at that range. Still, I’d like to see his balance sheet, curse him!’
Outside The Breakers, Baby Studfield, still clad in her Usherette costume—a grossly irregular but quite attractive feminisation of the uniform of His Majesty’s Brigade of Guards—was about to climb into the chair of a young gentleman friend, one Barry Gates by name, who had been waiting for her for more than two hours, when she espied Conway and Mrs. Tilford emerging from the brightly illuminated entrance of the hotel. Deserting her long-suffering cavalier, Baby ran to the foot of the steps.
‘That was a perfectly wonderful talk you gave us, Captain Conway,’ she said; ‘and you made me cry, if that’s any satisfaction. Still, I want to tell you something. We love your Tommies, and they are great; but you wait about six months, and then see what this little old country of ours can do.’
‘That's the first really sensible remark I’ve heard this evening,’ said Conway, shaking hands. ‘Good-night, Miss America—and good luck!’ He kissed the flushed child’s hand, and she ran back to her escort with swelling heart.
‘If you dare to speak to me in the next five minutes, Barry,’ she said as she climbed into the chair, ‘I’ll kill you!’
‘Just as you say, Baby,’ replied the docile Mr. Gates.
They trundled silently away into the moonlight. Conway whistled up the patient George from his moorings in the shadow of a neighbouring palm.
‘Do we-all go to the Tilford home, Captain?’ inquired George, as Conway took his seat beside his hostess.
‘We do, George.’
‘Right away, suh!’
The last couple to leave were Virginia Storey and Roger Marvin.
‘Virginia, will you come around to the Poinciana and dance?’ said the boy.
‘No, Roger, thank you: I’m kind of all in to-night. You can walk along with me, if you like; we won’t have a chair.’
Together they set off in the moonlight, arms linked. American boys and girls are much less self-conscious than ours. They develop more rapidly; indeed, they develop one another. The monastic system which segregates our adolescents is unknown in America. The American boy is curiously at home in the company of the opposite sex, because he is seldom out of it. He spends all his boyhood in his home; and he is educated, in most cases, at a day school, which he attends with his sister—and other boys' sisters. Consequently he is never independent of female society—as we sometimes think we are—and when he is about twenty-one or so he marries the girl from next door, and there is an end of it—or the beginning.
Roger Marvin was twenty-one. Virginia was eighteen, and her father's daughter. To-night she was in an ecstatic mood, which in a woman very often means a melting mood. Young America’s love of country is a curiously passionate thing: there is still a touch of the Declaration of Independence about it. To-night, in her eager young heart, Virginia could hear, like her father, the tramp of the thousands who were coming to vindicate America's fighting qualities and America’s honour in the eyes of the world. And the boy at her side would be among those thousands—among the very first of them! Her arm stiffened suddenly within his, half proudly, half fearfully.
The ever-watchful Roger, deciding, very sensibly, to take a chance, responded by sliding his hand respectfully into hers. She laughed, shakily, and looked away, but did not withdraw her hand.
Presently they were conscious of a house among the palms close by—Geraldine Tilford's house. Lights were burning in the dining-room.
‘Geraldine's having a supper party,’ said Virginia, chiefly for the sake of saying something.
‘Supper for two, I’ll tell the world!’ commented Roger.
They walked on a little farther.
‘I guess Geraldine can land her fish any time she wants now,’ continued Virginia, still making conversation.
‘It shouldn’t be difficult. Geraldine's some bait, with her face and her bank roll. I should worry about being that fish!’
‘Do you admire Geraldine so much?’ inquired Virginia, looking up swiftly.
It was what is known as a leading and provocative question, and it brought that simmering cauldron, Master Roger Marvin, to boiling point. Impulsively he halted in the middle of the moon-dappled road, and took the girl's hands in his.
‘Virginia,’ he whispered, ‘you know I admire no one in the world but you; and—and—I love you—and I always have—and I want you to marry me, right now—before we get into this War. Will you?’ His arms went around her slim young body.
Virginia smiled up at him, largely.
‘I’ll say I will, my dear,’ she replied; and her eyes Were Wet.
Let us leave them to themselves. Neither of them will ever have a moment quite like this again in all their lives; and who are we to intrude upon them? Let us retrace our steps to a more sophisticated quarter.
III
‘This,’ said Dale Conway, leaning back in his chair and exhaling a blue cloud from one of Mrs. Tilford's cigars, ‘is bliss!’ He leaned forward again. ‘Geraldine!’
His hostess, sitting on the other side of the table, quivered. Her incurably romantic little heart began to bump. The late lamented Joshua Tilford had never awakened thrills of this kind in her by the mere utterance of her Christian name. He had been a good, sound man of business, an entirely prosaic person from a small town in Illinois—an undoubted success on Wall Street, but a complete failure on Riverside Drive. His instincts were entirely commercial and domestic; and, though Geraldine had striven hard to inject romance into him, he had disappointed her. In fact, he had died under the operation.
After his demise Geraldine, now in her twenty-third year, decided that she had done her duty by the prose of this world, and was entitled at last to her share of its poetry—a decision which had considerably narrowed her field in the selection of a second husband. Troubadours are scarce in American society—indeed, in all modern society, which is affected with an exaggerated sense of humour—and for two years Geraldine had wearily rejected the advances of a stream of lawyers, politicians, stockbrokers, and needy persons frankly in search of a permanent meal-ticket. After making the acquaintance of Colonel Winter in Washington six months previously, she had been conscious of a leaning towards a husband in uniform. Then, ten days ago, she had met Dale Conway—soldier, poet, and spellbinder—and had recognised her affinity almost immediately. And now, as Dale Conway leaned across the table and said ‘Geraldine!’ she realised that her affinity had recognised her.
The affinity was gazing at her, with glowing eyes.
‘Do you mind my calling you Geraldine?’ he asked.
‘Why, no.’
‘Thank you!’ He came a little closer. ‘Shall I tell you what you are?’
‘Yes, if you like. What am I?’
‘An oasis.’
‘You mean—a thing in a desert?’
‘Yes—a human oasis. Something very rare, and soothing, and refreshing—
‘O-o-oh!’—in a rapturous whisper. Joshua had never said things like this.
—‘that a traveller, if he is lucky, may encounter once or twice in his journey through—the wilderness.’ Conway paused, and took up his cigar again.
‘Has your journey taken you through the wilderness?’ asked Geraldine, with a sudden soft glance.
Conway nodded.
‘I suppose it has, most of the time. I’m not squealing. I’m a philosopher. It's mainly a matter of luck, and how you begin.’
‘How true that is,’ said Geraldine with a sigh.
‘Yes, every time. Sometimes, early in life, before we are able to see very clearly ahead, and when we are young and impulsive, we take a step which carries us off the green path and points us straight for the wilderness. And before we know where we are’—Conway shook his head regretfully—‘we find ourselves right in the middle of it. And some of us never get back.’
‘I know,’ said Geraldine. She looked up, as to a confessor. ‘I—I made a step like that once.’
‘You mean—your marriage?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was he unkind to you? Did he ill-treat you?’
Conway's voice suddenly hardened. He had a fierce hatred of anything like physical cruelty.
‘Oh, no. He was the gentlest thing. But—well, you know how it goes. I guess his aura was wrong for me.’
Conway nodded sympathetically.
‘Love is everything,’ he said. ‘If it’s not there, nothing else will do.’ He sighed deeply.
Presently Geraldine inquired, timidly:
‘Would you think me terribly curious if I asked you what was your false step?’
Again Conway smiled.
‘I have made more than one, I'm afraid,’ he said; ‘but the one we are thinking of was the same as yours.’
‘You married?’
‘Yes.’
‘The wrong woman?’
‘Yes. No—that’s not fair! Perhaps I should say she married the wrong man.’
‘How chivalrous you are! But do you mean to tell me she didn’t love you?’
‘She didn't understand me. (That's a bromide, I know; but a truth doesn’t cease to be a truth because it has become bromidic.) Somehow I never could get much response out of her. Perhaps it was my fault: too rough a diamond, and so forth. I haven’t seen her for nearly fifteen years. I expect she has been happily married this long while.’
‘Was she beautiful?’
‘Very—in a cold-storage sort of way. But she must be getting on now; nearly forty, I should say.’
Geraldine was suddenly conscious of a kinder feeling towards the former Mrs. Conway.
‘And you,’ she said softly,‘are all alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘And when you go home after the War, you’ll have no home to go to?’
‘No.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘Home is a word that means nothing to me. I have been a wanderer, a rolling stone, all my life. This War was a Godsend to me, in a sense. It took me away from myself.’
‘You poor man! Fancy welcoming a war! But—perhaps you will stay right here in America?’
‘Do you think America wants me?’
Here was a question precisely similar to that recently propounded to Roger Marvin by Virginia Storey; and it had the same effect. Geraldine's heart was suddenly filled by a wave of real pity and affection.
‘I think I know one person who does,’ she said.
Their eyes met across the table. Dale Conway rose from his seat and knelt upon the floor by Geraldine's chair. His sangfroid had left him: he was breathless and agitated. There was a look in his face of a strong swimmer in deep waters, suddenly conscious of an unbelievable foothold.
‘Do you really mean that?’ he whispered. ‘You beautiful thing! You really care?’
Geraldine bowed her golden head.
‘You could love a broken man—a piece of driftwood—like me?’ Conway's forehead was resting on her arm now. For the moment he really was a broken man, really a piece of driftwood.
Geraldine laid a fluttering hand upon his head.
‘You’ll marry me?’ he murmured.
‘Whenever you say, Dale, dear.’
They bade one another good-night on the verandah a few minutes later.
‘I’ll call for you to-morrow morning, and we’ll go down to the beach for our usual wash and brush up—eh?’ suggested Conway. He was his easy-going self again now.
‘We certainly will,’ said Geraldine enthusiastically. ‘And we'll tell everybody!’
Conway cleared his throat.
‘Well—do you know—don’t think me infernally romantic, dear—but wouldn’t it be rather jolly to keep it to our two selves for a bit—just to be our secret, and no one else’s?’
Geraldine looked up, in genuine concern. The corners of her mouth were drooping.
‘Why, Dale, I’m so proud of you. I want to—’
‘But think what it all means. The publicity— the interviews—our photographs in the Sunday papers, and—er—so on. Can't I have you all to myself just for a while—till we get back to New York, perhaps? That’ll give us time to make all our wedding arrangements in peace. Then, when we're ready—quite ready—we'll announce our engagement and get married directly after—say, in a fortnight, or a week. During that time I promise you shall take me to every pink tea in sight and pass me round to your heart's content. Will that satisfy you?’
Geraldine buried her face in his shoulder.
‘Anything satisfies me that satisfies you, honey,’ she murmured.
A supplementary good-night followed.
‘This time,’ Geraldine whispered, with her arms about his neck, ‘I hope you are going to get the wife you deserve.’
Conway laughed grimly.
‘I hope not!’ he said.