Wild Wings: A Romance of Youth

by Margaret Piper Chalmers

She had consulted the senior doctor before making the splendid plunge. She did not want to have Larry buy her anything more and she didn't want Doctor Philip and Margery to think her stark mad to go behaving like a princess before the princess purse was actually in her hands. But she had to have pretty things, a lot of them, had to have them quick. Did the doctor mind very much advancing her some money? He could keep her rings as security.

He had laughed indulgently and declared as the rings and the pearls too for that matter were in his possession in the safe deposit box he should worry. He also told her to go ahead and be as "princessy" as she liked. He would take the risk. Whereupon he placed a generous sum of money at her account in a Boston bank and sent her away with his blessing and an amused smile at the femininity of females. And Ruth had gone and played princess to her heart's content. But there was little enough of heart's content in any of it for poor Larry. Day by day it seemed to him he could see his fairy girl slipping away from him. Ruth was a great lady and heiress. Who was Larry Holiday to take advantage of the fact that circumstances had almost thrown her into his willing arms?

Moreover the information afforded as to Roderick Farringdon had put a new idea into his head. Roderick was reported "missing." Was it not possible that Geoffrey Annersley might be in the same category? Missing men sometimes stayed missing in war time but sometimes also they returned as from the dead from enemy prisons or long illnesses. What if this should be the case with the man who was presumably Ruth's husband? Certainly it put out of the question, if there ever had been a question in Larry's mind, his own right to marry the girl he loved until they knew absolutely that the way was clear.

Considering these things it was not strange that the new year found Larry Holiday in heavy mood, morose, silent, curt and unresponsive even to his uncle, inclined at times to snap even at his beloved little Goldilocks whose shining new happiness exasperated him because he could not share it. Of course he repented in sack cloth and ashes afterward, but repentance did not prevent other offenses and altogether the young doctor was ill to live with during those harrassed January days.

It was not only Ruth. Larry could not take Ted's going with the quiet fortitude with which his uncle met it. Those early weeks of nineteen hundred and seventeen were black ones for many. The grim Moloch War demanded more and ever more victims. Thousands of gay, brave, high spirited lads like Ted were mown down daily by shrapnel and machine gun or sent twisted and writhing to still more hideous death in the unspeakable horror of noxious gases. It was all so unnecessary—so senseless. Larry Holiday whose life was dedicated to the healing and saving of men's bodies hated with bitter hate this opposing force which was all for destruction and which held the groaning world in its relentless grip. It would not have been so bad he thought if the Moloch would have been content to take merely the old, the life weary, the diseased, the vile. Not so. It demanded the young, the strong, the clean and gallant hearted, took their bodies, maimed and tortured them, killed them sooner or later, hurled them undiscriminatingly into the bottomless pit of death.

To Larry it all came back to Ted. Ted was the embodiment, the symbol of the rest. He was the young, the strong, the clean and gallant hearted—the youth of the world, a vain sacrifice to the cruel blindness of a so called civilization which would not learn the futility of war and all the ways of war.

So while Ruth bought pretty clothes and basked in happy anticipations which for her took the place of memories, poor Larry walked in dark places and saw no single ray of light.

One afternoon he was summoned to the telephone to receive the word that there was a telegram for him at the office. It was Dunbury's informal habit to telephone messages of this sort to the recipient instead of delivering them in person. Larry took the repeated word in silence. A question evidently followed from the other end.

"Yes, I got it," Larry snapped back and threw the receiver back in place with vicious energy. His uncle who had happened to be near looked up to ask a question but the young doctor was already out of the room leaving only the slam of the door in his wake. A few moments later the older man saw the younger start off down the Hill in the car at a speed which was not unlike Ted's at his worst before the smash on the Florence road. Evidently Larry was on the war path. Why?

The afternoon wore on. Larry did not return. His uncle began to be seriously disturbed. A patient with whom the junior doctor had had an appointment came and waited and finally went away somewhat indignant in spite of all efforts to soothe her not unnatural wrath. Worse and worse! Larry never failed his appointments, met every obligation invariably as punctiliously as if for professional purposes he was operated by clock work.