“When you sail my wife and I will be on the same ship. We’d be there now if we had our way—it’s all we talk about. Well——”
And he was about to say that he must hurry like mad now to make up for time well lost, when the shop door opened to admit out of a sharp dash of rain a customer who was trying to shelter a flat package beneath his coat. For the second time that day Robert Black was bringing pictures to be framed; in fact, they were the rest of the pile which he had not ventured to bring the first time, lest Miss Ray’s prices be too high for him.
Red gave him one look, and would have fled, but Black did not make for the big doctor with outstretched hand—in fact, he did not seem to see him. At the very front of the shop stood a particularly distinguished looking Hepplewhite sideboard, its serpentine front exquisitely inlaid with satinwood, its location one to catch the eye. It caught Black’s eye—but not because of any cunning design of maker or shopkeeper. Having filled the available space in the rear of the shop with her war posters, Jane had worked toward the front, and the last and most splendid of them she had propped upon the sideboard. In front of it Black now came to a standstill, and Red, intending to leave the place in haste at sight of the minister he was in no hurry to meet, involuntarily paused to note the effect upon the “Kid”—as he persisted in calling him—of the poster’s touchingly convincing appeal.
It was a drawing in black and white of a French mother taking leave of her son, that subject which has employed so many clever pens and brushes since the war began, but than which there is none more universally powerful in its importunity. The indomitable courage in the face of the Frenchwoman had in it a touch beyond that of the ordinary artist to convey—one could not analyze it, but it gripped the heart none the less, as Red himself could testify. He now watched it grip Black.
Without taking his eyes from the picture Black propped his umbrella against a chair, laid his hat and his package upon it, and stood still before the Frenchwoman and her boy, unconscious of anything else. And as he stood there, slowly his hands, hanging at his sides, became fists which clenched themselves. Red, observing, his own hand upon the big wrought-iron latch of the door, paused still a moment longer. The “Kid” cared, did he? How much did he care, then? Red found himself rather wanting to know.
Black looked up at last, saw the other man, saw that he was the quarry he was so anxious to run down, but only said, as his gaze returned to the poster, “And she’s only one of thousands, all with a spirit like that!”
“Only one,” Red agreed. “They’re astonishing, those Frenchwomen.” Then he went on out and closed the door behind him.
After he had gone he admitted to himself that since his wife was a member of this man’s church, and Black probably knew that fact, he himself might have stayed long enough to shake hands. At close range his eyesight, trained to observe, had not been able to avoid noting that Black was no boy, after all. There had been that in the face he had momentarily turned toward Red to show plainly that he was in the full first maturity of manhood. It may be significant that from this moment, in whatever terms Red spoke of the minister at home when he was forced by the exigencies of conversation to mention him at all, he ceased to call him “the Kid.” So, though Black did not know it, he had passed at least one barrier to getting to know the man he meant to make his friend.
CHAPTER III
NO ANÆSTHETIC
OF COURSE the day came, as it inevitably must, when Black and Red actually met, face to face, with no way out but to shake hands, look each other in the eye, and consider their acquaintance made? No, that day of proper introduction never came. But the day did come on which they looked each other in the eye without shaking hands—and another day, a long time after, they did shake hands. As to their friendship—but that’s what this story is about.