IV
DADE had provisionally accepted Beck’s invitation to the Army and Navy ball, but after Mrs. Emerson had showed her endurance in an Easter service at one of the fashionable churches, there was no longer doubt that she would postpone her return to Illinois and the resumption of Doctor Larkin’s treatment until that great event should have passed into history. As the night of the ball drew near, Beck was in a flutter almost feminine, and Dade’s preparations went forward in such excitement that the old lady herself finally awakened an interest and determined to accompany Dade as chaperon.
Now that the night had come, she showed no regret for her decision, for, with a robust floridity that may have been but the final flowering of her carefully nurtured ailments, she sat and fanned herself all the evening, basking in the smiles of the young officers Beck brought up in reliefs to keep her from growing weary and impatient. These war-like youths in the esprit de corps that had been hazed into them at the national nursery heroically stood at their posts, reminded, whenever they caught a glimpse of the proud girl in the fine state of her black chiffon gown, whirling by with their brother officer, that the honor of the service was being upheld.
“They are charming, these young officers of our army!” the old lady whispered to Dade as they were going out to supper. “So much more sincere than foreign officers, such gentlemen!”
“Of cou’se,” Dade replied, but more for Beck’s benefit than for her mother’s, “they ah gentlemen bah Act of Congress.”
The old lady fed recklessly on the salads and ices, and Dade foresaw the loud alarms that would appal the nights for a week afterwards, but Beck observed her gastronomic exploits with satisfaction, for it all meant time to him. Dade had limited him to four dances, and in the wide, wide intervals between them, he had moped in the smoking room, just as if he were the love-sick hero of a novel. But now he pressed his suit by urging more dishes on the mother, and she ate gaily and carelessly on, and drank enough coffee to insure insomnia for the whole summer. And then after supper, Dade went off with a mere civilian, and left Beck and her mother to watch the brilliant stream of uniforms flow by.
It was the male, who in a reversion to the barbaric type, made a display of toilets that night, and not the female. There were uniforms everywhere. The embowered Marine Band, itself cutting no mean figure in its white breeches and scarlet coats, played the tunes that were popular that spring, while the proud and happy men moved by in glittering splendor—navy officers, with their gold-braided dress coats and low waistcoats; army officers, in the white stripes of the infantry, the yellow of the cavalry, or the red of the artillery; the members of some local company of rifles in their cadet gray and pipe-clayed cross-belts, now and then some foreign officer in the pride of his own pulchritude, and the happy consciousness that he was serving nobly in that hour because his uniform marked him out even in all that distinction of gold-mounted clothes.
The members of the diplomatic corps, too, had come with their ribbons and stars, to give the final touch of splendor; even the Japanese and Chinese ministers with their silks and fans were there, gazing calmly on from the far misty distance of their oriental lives. There were, to be sure, some white-headed old infantry captains who had not a sign of gold cord on their breasts, but they served to show how unequally the real rewards of military service are apportioned.
Dade could see Beck, striding here and there over the ball room floor, trampling the trains of gowns, with muttered apologies as angry as the vengeful looks the ladies flung at him, but she did not cast one glance in his direction to help him in his quest. Rather, with her head inclined indolently, her long arms, in their black mousquetaire gloves, stretched straight to her knees, her fingers knit together, she sat and talked to the black-coated civilian, who, despite the eclipse into which he and all his unnoticed kind were thrown by the blaze of uniforms that night, had manfully striven to shine in his own proper luster.
Yet from the corner of her dark eye, she followed Beck’s frantic evolutions as he dashed in and out among the promenading couples, assuring herself again that she had never known how handsome the young soldier was until she beheld him that night for the first time in uniform. She had always longed to see him armed and equipped, and had frankly told him so, not at all to his discomfort or displeasure, but she pictured him at such times as a kind of animated Remington figure in cavalry boots and spurs, a heavy saber hooked up at his belt, and a six-shooter in its holster swinging ready to his right hand; with gauntlets, too, a gray campaign hat to shade his eyes, and a polka-dotted handkerchief knotted at his sun-burned throat. Then, in the violet haze of the western prairies, a body of hardened troopers standing by, some picketed horses, a grizzled officer with a field glass, and perhaps some Indians on their ponies impudently galloping in far off taunting circles, had completed the picture her young imagination had made of him.
But he had presented himself before her that evening as the apotheosis of the full-dress uniform, with his cavalry cape over his shoulders—though it had one corner thrown back to give freedom to his right arm, and possibly to show its own yellow lining—and his helmet with its long yellow horse-hair plume hanging to his shoulders, and adding at least a cubit to his stature, after the cubit of a man. When they arrived at the armory, he had doffed the helmet and the cape, but it was only to display himself in the more gorgeous magnificence of his helmet cord, arranged on his breast with an intricacy that would have bewildered a lady’s maid, and his heavier aiguillettes, which his detail as aide-de-camp now entitled him to wear, looped from his right shoulder.
His shoulder knots gave him an effect of greater broadness, and when he walked his long saber smote militantly against the wide yellow stripe that ran down his leg. His face, tanned to a chronic brown by the suns of the Southwest, where he had been chasing Apaches for three years, was red to-night with the heat and the excitement of this social expression of the civilization he was so glad to get back to, and his yellow hair, cropped close in the military style, was twisting tightly at his brow into the curls that he would have cultivated had he been trained to some practical occupation.
The eclipsed civilian was glad enough when the band struck up a waltz, and rescued him from Dade’s comparative studies of uniforms, for if he did not quite recover his individuality with his new partner, he could at least forget it in the vertiginous mazes of the dance.
Dade, left alone, began to long for Beck’s coming to save her from the ignominy of a wallflower, and, under the stress of this apprehension, she held herself more stiffly with the intention of acquiring thereby a greater visibility, and of expressing that reproach site meant him to feel in the moment when he should discover her thus deserted. She could see him still dashing here and there on the outlook for her.
He had left the middle of the floor where the gyrating dancers made his position absurd and even dangerous, and now, applying the tactics of his arm of the service, was beating up the walls of the room, feeling that there somewhere, his scout must end. When he saw her at last, his perspiring face lit up, and he bore down upon her in triumph. He sank into the chair beside her, and, drawing out a handkerchief, began to pat his brow delicately with it, though he would have liked to give his hot face a good scrubbing.
“Have yo’ all been having a good tahm?” drawled Dade, with her eyes far away to where the Chinese minister was cross-examining some woman on the subject of her age and her maiden name.
“No,” Beck said, bluntly.
“Ah should think yo’ would,” Dade replied, coldly.
Beck looked at her in alarm.
“Why?” he ventured.
“Yo’ seemed to have difficulty in teahing yo’self away.”
Beck’s alarm became positive.
“I have been looking for you everywhere,” he said in earnest defense.
“And then,” she continued, as if to eliminate herself from consideration as quickly as possible, “ah yo’ not in unifohm?”
She turned toward him, and inclining her head over her white shoulder, looked at him with an eye to sartorial effects.
“If you only knew how hot this dress uniform is!” He scoured his whole visage with his handkerchief, and angrily pulled at the collar that was binding his neck.
“But just think how remahkably well yo’ all look in it,” she said, her lips parting in a mocking smile.
“Don’t, please,” he said, quite seriously. “Do you think we live only for uniforms?”
“Don’t yo’?” she asked. “Look at that red commodo’e theah. He comes into the hotel pahlo’ every night buhsting in that unifohm—he wouldn’t give it up fo’ the wo’ld.”
Beck smiled at the fat old sailor who was wheeling gravely around.
“If it weh not fo’ the unifohms we all would have no ahmy at all,” Dade persisted; “it is the unifohm that keeps the institution of milita’ism alive.”
“You seem to be thinking deeply to-night,” Beck replied.
“Ah nevah had such a good oppo’tunity befo’ fo’ studying the vanity of man.”
“If you could see us in the field, you wouldn’t think so,” Beck said, and he managed to put the words in the tone of one who had suffered for a great cause.
Dade glanced at him. She had a glimpse of her Remington picture again. His tone had touched her. She recalled all she had read of the hardships of soldiers’ lives, and she softened.
“Ah would lahk to see yo’ all theah,” she confessed.
“Would you?” He spoke eagerly, leaning toward her, gathering his saber into his lap. “You shall.” His cheek flushed red under his brown skin. He cast a glance about the armory, striving to hide its bare walls under the flags of all nations that had been draped there. The green plants standing stolidly in their tubs offered no place for a tête-à-tête.
She cast one glance his way, and then dropped her eyes.
“Yo’ swo’d theah, fo’ instance, is an emblem of vanity,” she went on hurriedly, in a final effort to regain her lost note of banter, “why do yo’ weah it in a ball room? Ah yo’ in dangeh? No, yo’ me’ely wish to show that yo’ can handle it skilfully in a dance—which yo’ can’t——” And she thrust a hand into a rent in her overskirt, and spread it over her palm in proof. “And those things, what do yo’ call them? That helmet co’d, as Leftenant Wood so cahfully explained to me, that is to hold yo’ helmet on; but yo’ haven’t yo’ helmet on now. And those othah things, lak pencils, that knock in mah eyes in dancing, what good ah they?”
She touched with the tip of her finger his dangling aiguillettes. The touch thrilled him.
“Did you hear me?” he went on. All her mockery had not been heard. She knew it had not been heard, and she tried to say more, but her mind would not work; she caught her breath. They were alone on that side of the great hall. He leaned closer.
“Did you hear me?” he went on. “You shall see me so if you will. I’ll take you there—will you go?”
She laughed softly.
“It would be a treat, wouldn’t it,” she said, “to see yo’ on yo’ native heath?”
His face remained serious. His jaw set.
“Dade,” he said, and she flushed crimson, “it’s no use—I can’t say it right—only—I love you, that’s all.”
She hung her head.
“Do you hear, darling?” he continued, bending nearer. “Do you hear? You must excuse the bluntness of a soldier—I love you, that’s all there is to it.”
He clutched the scabbard of his saber in his nervousness. Her hand had fallen to her side, and with his own he seized it, and crushed it between them.
“Listen,” he said, “I love you, love you, love you! Oh, if we were somewhere else! You can’t say ‘No’ now; you must not! You do love me, you must—listen, do you hear?—you must love me! If we were elsewhere I’d take you in my arms—I’ll do it anyway, here and now—what do I care? And you couldn’t stop me!”
He leaned impulsively forward. She stirred, and turned her face half-frightened toward him.
“Not here!”
“Tell me, then, do you love me?”
Her eyes looked full in his, and then, without dropping one of her Western r’s, she said:
“You know, Arthur.”
He crushed her hand until she winced with the pain.