CHAPTER XXII
WHEN Dr. Booth had said good-night to his dancing-partner, he had had to hunt for her. Reba, as always fearful of ceremonies and formal hand-shakings, had stepped into a shadow when Dr. Booth started to take his departure.
"Oh, there you are!" he had exclaimed, when finally he found her. "I've been looking for you." Then in a low voice, meant for her ears alone, he added, "We must have another dance soon together, mustn't we? I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll get up a little party with Miss Park and Gerard and somebody else, if you'll come. Will you?"
"Oh, I'd like to."
"And," he went on, enthusiastically, "we'll go somewhere to dinner, and then somewhere to dance afterward, where there is some real music. Soon, too! How's next Saturday, a week from to-night, for you?" he asked.
"It is all right for me."
"I'll let you know. Good-night," he said and held out his hand. Reba put hers into it. "Till Saturday then," he smiled, gave her hand a little significant squeeze, dropped it suddenly, turned and hurried away.
Reba didn't sleep very much that night. Her whole world had suddenly taken on a different color. She had seen in a flash what the pleasures of youth were that she had been missing all her life. That half-hour on the marble terrace, underneath the stars, possessed her body and mind. She couldn't get away from it. She didn't want to get away from it. She wanted to rehearse every detail that had led up to Dr. Booth's thrilling tribute to her "And I never danced with a woman before." And she did rehearse them, over and over again.
The next morning it was all excitement in the Park household, because of a telegram that Katherine Park had been called to receive over the telephone, while she and her father, and Reba, and two or three other early-risers were seated at the breakfast-table about nine o'clock.
Reba thought she had never seen Katherine's face quite so shining as when she returned from the telephone.
"It's come, people," she announced quietly from the door.
Reba saw Mr. Park's face flush suddenly as he abruptly glanced up over the rim of his reading-glasses, which he had put on, before attacking the pretty pile of unhulled strawberries on the plate before him.
"What's come?" he demanded impatiently, as if he very well knew.
"Marching orders, Daddy," replied Katherine, and went over to him immediately, perched herself on the arm of his chair, and began rumpling up his hair. "Oh, do be a little glad," she went on coaxingly, for Mr. Park sat impassive beneath her playful caresses, devoting his attention undividedly to the immediate business before him of strawberries and powdered sugar. "Do be a little happy with me," she rubbed her cheek against his baldish head. "I'm not going into the trenches, silly man."
Reba knew very well the nature of the news that made Katherine's eyes shine like that, and her voice shake a little. She knew that for the last twelve months Katherine's ambition had been to go to France with a hospital unit.
She was not a trained nurse, but surely, as again and again she had tried to persuade the various doctors, organizers, and high officials of the units preparing for service behind the trenches, surely she could make herself of use in a hospital. She was not afraid of work—nor of blood either—"strong as an ox," she would boast; could run an ambulance if they would let her; was willing to do anything—make beds, scrub, wash dishes, help in the kitchen, help anywhere, if only they would accept her. But, no, in spite of pressing every possibly influential friend she possessed into exerting his power in her behalf, time and again there proved to be no necessity for eager, intelligent hands such as hers, if she lacked a trained nurse's diploma. And then suddenly the summons! From New York! A unit organized by a surgeon of wide reputation was sailing on the following Wednesday, she explained. She was to report on Tuesday.
The telegram was brief, anything but satisfying to Mr. Park. He couldn't even finish his strawberries, much less attempt the parsley-trimmed fish-balls. Only a cup of coffee, and a slice of toast. That was all. But he patted Katherine's hand just the same. Reba saw that.
"It's your life, and you are old enough to use your own judgment. I'm glad you've got your wish, though it isn't just mine," he said. "Now run along, run along," he finished and Katherine hopped down and went back to her chair next to Reba's.
Reba was fully aware of what an event this was in Katherine's life. Going to France! Going to the great war! It was splendid—magnificent! But what about Chadwick Booth's dinner party next Saturday night? Katherine would be a third way across the Atlantic. O dear, there wouldn't be any dinner-party now!
But there was. Chadwick Booth attended to that. A European conflict mustn't be allowed to interfere with another dance such as that the other night, must it? No! He should say not, he laughed at Reba.
If Reba had hesitated at first, after an hour's reflection she was persuaded that it was a perfectly conventional thing to do. Dr. Booth had fully intended to ask Katherine Park (he had said so) and any party including Katherine was of course beyond reproach. Moreover, Dr. Booth was a friend of the Parks', and that was sufficient voucher to Reba that he was all things good and desirable. It would be presuming and prudish of one of her limited experience and bringing-up even to question the propriety of anything a man like Dr. Booth suggested, and she didn't want to appear prudish.
Of course there was that vague, dimming morning at the minister's to consider. But going to dinner with Dr. Booth was nothing that need trouble her conscience as far as Nathan was concerned, need it? Mrs. Remington, who was one of the guests at the Parks' a week ago, had quite readily accepted an invitation from that Tommy Blake to go to a concert with him (Reba had heard her) and Mrs. Remington's husband was in Philadelphia on a business trip. Mrs. Remington, Katherine had told Reba, when she inquired, was a Park before her marriage, a second cousin, or something of the sort, and always came over to the Park homestead when her husband was away on trips. Surely what Katherine's cousin did as a matter of course, Reba could rest assured was all right, for her to do.
Besides, she wanted to go—she wanted to go with all her heart—as much as Katherine wanted to go to France, she guessed. New Englanders were always denying themselves pleasure. This was her great opportunity for crawling under the edge of the curtain onto a corner of that stage which she had so yearningly gazed upon ever since she was a young girl at the summer-hotels. She went. And not only once.
It was a hot June, and a hotter July that year in Boston. Reba had volunteered early in the spring to remain at her post throughout the summer, taking her vacation, if she needed it at all, in September. Her duties were less arduous than in the winter, but the sewing-rooms were to be kept open for part of each day and there were to be one or two courses in First Aid continued through the summer for groups who had applied for the instruction. Dr. Booth had offered to teach these groups, as he explained he had to remain in town anyway, and might as well. It happened that it was after he had taken Reba to the cool place he knew about for dinner, and afterward to dance to some real music, that he so generously offered his services.
Reba was feverishly happy during the first month or six weeks of Dr. Booth's flattering and irresistible attentions. Nothing like it had ever happened to her before. Homage, in the dazzling form that Dr. Booth offered it, had never been paid to Reba in her life. To find herself seated in a restaurant at a little electric-candle-lighted table, her hands folded upon a snowy cloth, awaiting the arrival of little-neck clams embedded on cracked ice, or huge salmon-colored cantaloupe, or chilled heart-of-watermelon, with such dishes as broiled-live-lobster, or mushrooms under glass to follow, was so new to Reba that even without the lean hands folded two inches away from hers upon the cloth, and the gaze of the blue, brown-flecked eyes so disconcertingly near—even without these, it would have been difficult for her to resist the lure of the elegance of the entertainment offered her.
Chadwick Booth's personality itself was, of course, attractive to Reba, but it was not only the charm he possessed for women generally that held her. There was charm to her in the things he wore. His linen for instance, glimpses of striped lavenders, and cool greens, gave pleasure to Reba. There was something about his very shoes, too, a smartness, trigness, that was indicative to her of the fastidious world he had stepped out of—down out of—to spend some of his precious hours of recreation with her. She was continually stealing joy, too, from such physical details as high cheek-bones; smoothly shaven jaws; white shining teeth, beneath the small, black bristling mustache; clean high expanse of forehead. To Reba, Chadwick Booth's inclination to baldness betokened a subtle refinement that had been quite absent in her shock-headed Italian, and the sailor.
Oh, the sailor! The sailor! The sailor was the only dram of bitter in Reba's overflowing cup of intoxicating sweet. But after a while she became used to the bitter, just as when a child she became used to the bitter of choke-cherries after eating the first dozen, observing finally only the rare flavor.
The "Ellen T. Robinson" might have been lost in a storm by this time, for all Reba knew. When she had spent that Sunday with Katherine it had been weeks, months, since one of the spasmodic letters had arrived to remind her of "Number Four's" existence. Even the link that the residence in the Back Bay had been between her and the strange man of the sea had disappeared, for the house had been sold two years ago.
Mr. Barton had never returned to it, or permanently anyhow. A call had been given him by a church in San Francisco, whither the "Ellen T. Robinson" had borne him, and where he had remained afterward for a month or so. Reba had read of his acceptance of this call in the newspapers, and that Mrs. Barton was going to join her son in his new field of activity. There remained, therefore, little to remind Reba of her marriage—little to make her fear discovery; and though often she was sunk in deepest reflection because of it, over and over again she told herself that there was nothing in her new friendship that need disturb her. She and Dr. Booth were just friends, companions, after all. Even Dr. Booth emphasized that.
"We're both of us miserable, city-bound wretches this summer. Why not play together these hot nights, instead of each of us sitting miserably under an electric-light-bulb somewhere, and trying to kill time till a respectable retiring hour. We both of us are fellow-laborers. Let's be fellow-playmates too."
"I'm bored to death," he would write to her, in the little penciled notes she would find concealed inside the First Aid reference-book he borrowed from her desk, and returned afterward with such apparent off-handedness (he was careful to appear nothing but correctly official at the Alliance). "I'm bored. Come, please, and cheer up my lonely dinner-hour to-night, will you, Pal?" Or in a similar note, a day or two later, "You look wan and tired, Becky." (He had adopted Becky after their first dinner-party together.) "As a physician I prescribe one cool forty-mile drive next Saturday P.M., followed by a refreshing repast in sound of salt-sea waves, a dance or two, for exercise afterward, and a not too late return (I promise you, little Miss Prim) by gorgeous moonlight. What do you say?"
There was never any taint of love in Dr. Booth's rollicking notes, nor in his manner either, Reba concluded. There was not, anyhow, any stealthy imprisoning of her hand—nothing of that sort. Whatever peculiar pleasure she herself felt, in dancing with him, she was sure was not shared in the same way by him—a man of his sophistication, who according to his own statement had danced himself stale two winters ago. They were friends, that was all. She was glad that she had gotten away from the narrow Ridgefield idea that a man and a girl couldn't be friends without being lovers. Why, Dr. Booth sometimes in the automobile would even grasp her hand, with a free one of his, and give it a hard, delighted squeeze, as he laughed jovially at some remark or naïve question of hers. It was no caress to him, although it did send the blood surging through her. He would have done the same to a boy or a child.
Chadwick Booth fully intended to keep this amazing little discovery of his just what his words and manner portended—a pal, a harmless amusement for hot, summer evenings when everybody was away from town; when the echoing rooms of the uninhabited Back Bay house, in the front of which his office was located, offered no consolation; and the summer places of his friends, where he might have been received for over a Sunday only the tamest sort of entertainment.
In her way, Reba was quite as much of a novelty to Chadwick Booth as he to her. For after their first dinner-party alone, he discovered that she was as genuinely fresh a bit of femininity as he had ever run across. Most of the women of his acquaintance were so terribly used-to-everything, and worldly-wise. To those of his own social circle the pleasures of dining-out, and of brilliant ballrooms, were old and drained pleasures. To those outside his social circle, with whom he sometimes sought to amuse himself, the joys of restaurants and dance-halls appeared equally tasteless. Not until Chadwick Booth began selecting delectable dishes for Becky, planning little surprises in the way of an unexpected rose beside her plate, or package of sweets, did he know what joy (harmless joy, too, he told himself) there could be in giving a good time to a girl—a woman, that is, for Reba did not give the impression of girlhood, shy and eager as she was. There was a ripeness about her that did not require her confession to her twenty-eight years to assure Chadwick Booth that he was playing the part of no cradle-snatcher.
There was, too, a tantalizing unexpectedness about her. She had the most human and understandable desire for pleasures and little harmless worldly delights, which he knew so well how to provide, forever at war with an odd strain, amounting almost to asceticism, that to his satisfaction usually got the worst of it when he was near at hand. But not always. The strength of Becky's resistance, at times, was amazing to Chadwick Booth. He could almost hear the beat of the wings of her impulses against the prison walls of her New England reserve, but he could not always break the walls. Therefore was added the lure of conquest.
She dressed, too, in surprisingly good taste; never appeared conspicuous, nor, on the other hand, dowdy. She might have been, to any of his acquaintances who chanced to see them together, a sister or cousin.