“Doing? Nothin’! It’s this damned play!”
“You mean that there were women who seriously asked this Miss Thorne to have Margot withdrawn because you’d produced a risqué farce? But that’s—”
His wrath reached a piteous climax in, “Oh, damn women, anyhow!... Well I took her out. My broker could have fixed the thing up. What’s the use? Well, I brought her over with me. She’s at the Ritz. What’s the best girls’ school in England?”
Olive said, “Oh, I’ll take her,” saw him smile and began to weep.
V
Margot
GURDY BERNAMER kept his twentieth birthday in a trench. The next week his regiment was withdrawn from the line to a dull village where Gurdy was taking a warm bath in a zinc tub behind the Mairie when a German aeroplane crossed above and lifted his attention from a Red Cross copy of “The Brook Kerith” which he read while he soaked. He dropped the dialectics of George Moore and watched, then saw the whitewashed wall of the yard bend in slowly, its cracks blackening. He spent a month in hospital getting the best of the wandering, deep wound that began at his right hip and ended in his armpit. He wrote to Mark, “I kept trying to remember a quotation from Twain’s Tramp Abroad. ‘Not by war’s shock or war’s shaft. Shot with a rock on a raft.’ They dug a piece of zinc out of me. I feel fairly well. Mrs. Tilford Arbuthnot has the Y. M. C. A. cafeteria in Bordeaux. Her brother was with me at Saint Andrew’s. She brings me novels and things. I think she has a secret passion for you. She says you were a great actor. My nurse also thinks you were. Her name is Zippah Coe and she looks it. She says the immorality of French women is too awful for words. She is coming to take my temperature.” The temperature displeased the nurse and Gurdy passed into a daze. The wet hemlocks beyond the window sometimes turned cerise, inexcusably. Pneumonia succeeded his influenza.
Through all this lapse he meditated and drew toward a belief that life was a series of meaningless illusions, many painful. He expanded “All the world’s a stage.” Suicide wasn’t universal as some of the players acquired a thrilling interest in their parts, rose to be directors—Wilsons, Northcliffes, Millerands. It was satisfactory to know this at twenty. His education was complete in its departments passional, athletic and philosophical. Saint Andrew’s school. Two and a half years of Yale in smart company. The miscellany of his regiment. He must certainly begin maturity as a critic. He lay composing an essay on the illusory value of passion in a loop of paradoxes which vanished as his pulse improved. Then he was conscious that a surgeon took interest in him. Orderlies came from the hospital adjutant inquiring. Gurdy sat up, read the papers and accepted five thousand francs in mauve and blue bills from a bank agent. It seemed that Mark had run him to earth by cabling. Soon he was uniformed again and given orders that assigned him to duty in a Paris military bureau. There Gurdy found Mark’s broker, decorated as a Major.
“Of course, I got you up here,” said Major Villay. “Why not?”