“I took a minute off to look at him. Yes, he had the appearance of having downed a few drinks. There was a lot more, too—he certainly had been riding the sad sea waves! ‘Where do you get it, you officer guys?’ I asked him. He didn’t answer—he was lamping me. ‘On the stage up there, you seemed quite wicked. Now, you are a disappointment. I can never be taken up for conduct unbecoming an officer, with you at my table.’
“I opened my mouth and nearly fell in it. Then I managed to get out that I’d better leave, so he could try someone else. He said ‘No—I want you. You look as though you had enough joy of living to cheer up even a dead one—and that’s what I am, or the next thing to it.’
“I suggested that if he wanted me to trot out any joy of living stuff, we had better leave that place and come on up to my apartment. I had some there—a small but good assortment. I had outgrown my taste for beer, but still wolfed down the Demon Rum—and I couldn’t sit in Hanley’s much longer without being recognized. He paid the check and we were off without even waiting for the change. Now I knew he’d been drinking. It’s a long way from Hanley’s to West 111th, in case you don’t know—in a taxi—although only about twenty minutes in the Subway. We got in a meter-wagon and started off through the white lights. My heart was travelling quicker than the meter.
“‘It’s sort of unusual for an officer to be alone in New York, isn’t it?’ I said, and he pulled a laugh that would have been funny if it hadn’t been so pitiful. ‘Alone? I’m the loneliest man in New York.’ Then he set himself off and told me what was rotting in the State of Denmark. His girl had knocked him one by quietly side-stepping around the corner and getting sewed up to a French artillery officer. This had just burst in upon him when he had heaved in from Upton that P.M.—after leaving her last week with all the encouragement in the world. It had made him simply silly—he’d been sampling everything he could get hold of, and was quite poppo by now, as I could see.
“That girl was probably a good girl, but she hadn’t played fair, to do a thing like that. And when you don’t play fair, you let yourself in for a lot of responsibility. Here was her responsibility—shifted to me—and I was her opposite. I hadn’t been good, according to her standards, but I had always played fair.
“I gathered, as we bumped along through Columbus Circle, that she had been about the only thing that had been keeping him treading water, just now. He’d been made a Captain at Plattsburg, and he hadn’t felt he was up to such a position; and at Upton he was feeling it more and more. He told me about two young officers who’d shot themselves because they were going crazy with their cares and responsibilities. It was a tough thing for some of those young kids, to feel that they had whole companies of men under them to answer for, when up to now they had never answered for anything but the dog. He said if he hadn’t been older than those kids he now would be tempted to do the same thing; that he never felt nearer to it.
“It all seemed like a dream, Joy—bumping along in a taxi beside the man I’d been in love with for so long—and he spreading his tale of woe. It couldn’t have happened any other time but war times. If he thought about telling me this stuff at all, he thought I was the grade of intelligence that would peacefully let it slide by. I got that fact, and began to think in quick flashes. Ever since I had watched the back of his head, back in Charlette’s, I had fixed it in my mind so that he could have walked over me in golf shoes and I would have sat up and begged for more. I wanted to get hold of that girl and feel my fingernails meet in her throat. As for Phil—the more he talked about it, the gloomier an atmosphere he cast.
“We got to my apartment and as I opened up some joy getter, he passed the remark that I did myself pretty well for a cabaret singer. Then he slumped right down again, and got so low he couldn’t even drink. ‘It’s no use,’ he said; ‘in my frame of mind, Uncle Sam’s army is better off without me, and God knows there’s no one else in this universe who would care!’ When men say that, you always know they mean a girl. They never seem to think of their families in that connection.
“I went over to where he was looking at my wine, and said: ‘You’re drunk. To snuff yourself out would brand you a coward in the eyes of the world and God, too. Besides which, I won’t let you.’ He ripped off a nasty laugh at that. ‘This is really almost amusing—to be sitting listening to a cabaret girl tell me she won’t let me “snuff myself out!”’ He took my hand, and hung onto it. ‘Then you do want me for the eighth star!’ A man never plain holds your hand, it seems—it’s just a starter. ‘Listen here,’ I said. ‘I may be a cabaret girl, but I’m not several other little things you seem to think I am. I’ve got “honour and truth and a sure intent,” which is more than you’ll have if you follow up your intent with me!’
“He dropped my hand like a hot potato and squared off to take a look at me. ‘Did you say honour and truth and——?’ ‘I did,’ said I. ‘So come to and stay there.’ ‘I never made a mistake like this before,’ he said. ‘I think I had better go.’