Chapter VI

Mabel had made a hit. Unconscious imitator that she was, she stole Edith's former recklessness, and added to it something of her own dash and verve. Lethway, standing in the wings, knew she was not and never would be Edith. She was not fine enough. Edith at her best had frolicked. Mabel romped, was almost wanton. He cut out the string music at the final rehearsal. It did not fit.

On the opening night the brass notes of the orchestra blared and shrieked. Mabel's bare feet flew, her loose hair, cut to her ears and held only by a band over her forehead, kept time in ecstatic little jerks. When at last she pulled off the fillet and bowed to the applause, her thick short hair fell over her face as she jerked her head forward. They liked that. It savoured of the abandoned. She shook it back, and danced the encore without the fillet. With her scant chiffons whirling about her knees, her loose hair, her girlish body, she was the embodiment of young love, of its passion, its fire.

Edith had been spring, palpitant with gladness.

Lethway, looking with tired eyes from the wings, knew that he had made a commercial success. But back of his sordid methods there was something of the soul of an artist. And this rebelled.

But he made a note to try flame-coloured chiffon for Mabel. Edith was to have danced in the pale greens of a water nymph.

On the night of her triumph Mabel returned late to Edith's room, where she was still quartered. She was moving the next day to a small apartment. With the generosity of her class she had urged Edith to join her, and Edith had perforce consented.

"How did it go?" Edith asked from the bed.

"Pretty well," said Mabel. "Nothing unusual."

She turned up the light, and from her radiant reflection in the mirror Edith got the truth. She lay back with a dull, sickening weight round her heart. Not that Mabel had won, but that she herself had failed.

"You're awfully late."

"I went to supper. Wish you'd been along, dearie. Terribly swell club of some sort." Then her good resolution forgotten: "I made them sit up and take notice, all right. Two invitations for supper to-morrow night and more on the way. And when I saw I'd got the house going to-night, and remembered what I was being paid for it, it made me sick."

"It's better than nothing."

"Why don't you ask Lethway to take you on in the chorus? It would do until you get something else."

"I have asked him. He won't do it."

Mabel was still standing in front of the mirror. She threw her head forward so her short hair covered her face, and watched the effect carefully. Then she came over and sat on the bed.

"He's a dirty dog," she said.

The two girls looked at each other. They knew every move in the game of life, and Lethway's methods were familiar ones.

"What are you going to do about it?" Mabel demanded at last. "Believe me, old dear, he's got a bad eye. Now listen here," she said with impulsive generosity. "I've got a scheme. I'll draw enough ahead to send you back. I'll do it to-morrow, while the drawing's good."

"And queer yourself at the start?" said Edith scornfully. "Talk sense, Mabel, I'm up against it, but don't you worry. I'll get something."

But she did not get anything. She was reduced in the next week to entire dependence on the other girl. And, even with such miracles of management as they had both learned, it was increasingly difficult to get along.

There was a new element too. Edith was incredulous at first, but at last she faced it. There was a change in Mabel. She was not less hospitable nor less generous. It was a matter of a point of view. Success was going to her head. Her indignation at certain phases of life was changing to tolerance. She found Edith's rampant virtue a trifle wearing. She took to staying out very late, and coming in ready to meet Edith's protest with defiant gaiety. She bought clothes too.

"You'll have to pay for them sometime," Edith reminded her.

"I should worry. I've got to look like something if I'm going to go out at all."

Edith, who had never thought things out before, had long hours to think now. And the one thing that seemed clear and undeniable was that she must not drive Mabel into debt. Debt was the curse of most of the girls she knew. As long as they were on their own they could manage. It was the burden of unpaid bills, lightly contracted, that drove so many of them wrong.

That night, while Mabel was asleep, she got up and cautiously lighted the gas. Then she took the boy's photograph out of its hiding place and propped it on top of her trunk. For a long time she sat there, her chin in her hands, and looked at it.

It was the next day that she saw his name among the missing.

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, rehearsed 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 passed 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 analyse.

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 acumen asserted 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.