The Red Cross Girl

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But when she remembered him, although months had passed since she
had seen him, she remembered him much more distinctly, much more
gratefully, than that one of the two hundred and fifty with whom
she had walked that same afternoon. Latimer could not know it,
but of that anxious multitude he was first, and there was no
second. At least Helen hoped, when she was ready to marry, she
would love Latimer enough to want to marry him. But as yet she
assured herself she did not want to marry any one. As she was,
life was very satisfactory. Everybody loved her, everybody
invited her to be of his party, or invited himself to join hers,
and the object of each seemed to be to see that she enjoyed every
hour of every day. Her nature was such that to make her happy was
not difficult. Some of her devotees could do it by giving her a
dance and letting her invite half of Boston, and her kid brother
could do it by taking her to Cambridge to watch the team at
practice.

She thought she was happy because she was free. As a matter of
fact, she was happy because she loved some one and that
particular some one loved her. Her being "free" was only her
mistaken way of putting it. Had she thought she had lost Latimer
and his love, she would have discovered that, so far from being
free, she was bound hand and foot and heart and soul.

But she did not know that, and Latimer did not know that.

Meanwhile, from the branch of the tree in the sheltered, secret
hiding-place that overlooked the ocean, the sailorman kept watch.
The sun had blistered him, the storms had buffeted him, the snow
had frozen upon his shoulders. But his loyalty never relaxed. He
spun to the north, he spun to the south, and so rapidly did he
scan the surrounding landscape that no one could hope to creep
upon him unawares. Nor, indeed, did any one attempt to do so.
Once a fox stole into the secret hiding-place, but the sailorman
flapped his oars and frightened him away. He was always
triumphant. To birds, to squirrels, to trespassing rabbits he was
a thing of terror. Once, when the air was still, an impertinent
crow perched on the very limb on which he stood, and with
scornful, disapproving eyes surveyed his white trousers, his blue
reefer, his red cheeks. But when the wind suddenly drove past
them the sailorman sprang into action and the crow screamed in
alarm and darted away. So, alone and with no one to come to his
relief, the sailorman stood his watch. About him the branches
bent with the snow, the icicles froze him into immobility, and in
the tree-tops strange groanings filled him with alarms. But
undaunted, month after month, alert and smiling, he waited the
return of the beautiful lady and of the tall young man who had
devoured her with such beseeching, unhappy eyes.

Latimer found that to love a woman like Helen Page as he loved
her was the best thing that could come into his life. But to sit
down and lament over the fact that she did not love him did not,
to use his favorite expression, "tend toward efficiency." He
removed from his sight the three pictures of her he had cut from
illustrated papers, and ceased to write to her.

In his last letter he said: "I have told you how it is, and that
is how it is always going to be. There never has been, there
never can be any one but you. But my love is too precious, too
sacred to be brought out every week in a letter and dangled
before your eyes like an advertisement of a motor-car. It is too
wonderful a thing to be cheapened, to be subjected to slights and
silence. If ever you should want it, it is yours. It is here
waiting. But you must tell me so. I have done everything a man
can do to make you understand. But you do not want me or my love.
And my love says to me: 'Don't send me there again to have the
door shut in my face. Keep me with you to be your inspiration, to
help you to live worthily.' And so it shall be."

When Helen read that letter she did not know what to do. She did
not know how to answer it. Her first impression was that suddenly
she had grown very old, and that some one had turned off the sun,
and that in consequence the world had naturally grown cold and
dark. She could not see why the two hundred and forty-nine
expected her to keep on doing exactly the same things she had
been doing with delight for six months, and indeed for the last
six years. Why could they not see that no longer was there any
pleasure in them? She would have written and told Latimer that
she found she loved him very dearly if in her mind there had not
arisen a fearful doubt. Suppose his letter was not quite honest?
He said that he would always love her, but how could she now know
that? Why might not this letter be only his way of withdrawing
from a position which he wished to abandon, from which, perhaps,
he was even glad to escape? Were this true, and she wrote and
said all those things that were in her heart, that now she knew
were true, might she not hold him to her against his will? The
love that once he had for her might no longer exist, and if, in
her turn, she told him she loved him and had always loved him,
might he not in some mistaken spirit of chivalry feel it was his
duty to pretend to care? Her cheeks burned at the thought. It was
intolerable. She could not write that letter. And as day
succeeded day, to do so became more difficult. And so she never
wrote and was very unhappy. And Latimer was very unhappy. But he
had his work, and Helen had none, and for her life became a game
of putting little things together, like a picture puzzle, an hour
here and an hour there, to make up each day. It was a dreary
game.

From time to time she heard of him through the newspapers. For,
in his own State, he was an "Insurgent" making a fight, the
outcome of which was expected to show what might follow
throughout the entire West. When he won his fight much more was
written about him, and he became a national figure. In his own
State the people hailed him as the next governor, promised him a
seat in the Senate. To Helen this seemed to take him further out
of her life. She wondered if now she held a place even in his
thoughts.

At Fair Harbor the two hundred and forty-nine used to joke with
her about her politician. Then they considered Latimer of
importance only because Helen liked him. Now they discussed him
impersonally and over her head, as though she were not present,
as a power, an influence, as the leader and exponent of a new
idea. They seemed to think she no longer could pretend to any
peculiar claim upon him, that now he belonged to all of them.

Older men would say to her: "I hear you know Latimer? What sort
of a man is he?"

Helen would not know what to tell them. She could not say he was
a man who sat with his back to a pine-tree, reading from a book
of verse, or halting to devour her with humble, entreating eyes.

She went South for the winter, the doctors deciding she was run
down and needed the change. And with an unhappy laugh at her own
expense she agreed in their diagnosis. She was indifferent as to
where they sent her, for she knew wherever she went she must
still force herself to go on putting one hour on top of another,
until she had built up the inexorable and necessary twenty-four.

When she returned winter was departing, but reluctantly, and
returning unexpectedly to cover the world with snow, to eclipse
the thin spring sunshine with cheerless clouds. Helen took
herself seriously to task. She assured herself it was weak-minded
to rebel. The summer was coming and Fair Harbor with all its old
delights was before her. She compelled herself to take heart, to
accept the fact that, after all, the world is a pretty good
place, and that to think only of the past, to live only on
memories and regrets, was not only cowardly and selfish, but, as
Latimer had already decided, did not tend toward efficiency.

Among the other rules of conduct that she imposed upon herself
was not to think of Latimer. At least, not during the waking
hours. Should she, as it sometimes happened, dream of him--should
she imagine they were again seated among the pines, riding across
the downs, or racing at fifty miles an hour through country
roads, with the stone fences flying past, with the wind and the
sun in their eyes, and in their hearts happiness and
content--that would not be breaking her rule. If she dreamed of
him, she could not be held responsible. She could only be
grateful.

And then, just as she had banished him entirely from her mind, he
came East. Not as once he had planned to come, only to see her,
but with a blare of trumpets, at the command of many citizens, as
the guest of three cities. He was to speak at public meetings, to
confer with party leaders, to carry the war into the enemy's
country. He was due to speak in Boston at Faneuil Hall on the
first of May, and that same night to leave for the West, and
three days before his coming Helen fled from the city. He had
spoken his message to Philadelphia, he had spoken to New York,
and for a week the papers had spoken only of him. And for that
week, from the sight of his printed name, from sketches of him
exhorting cheering mobs, from snap-shots of him on rear platforms
leaning forward to grasp eager hands, Helen had shut her eyes.
And that during the time he was actually in Boston she might
spare herself further and more direct attacks upon her feelings
she escaped to Fair Harbor, there to remain until, on the first
of May at midnight, he again would pass out of her life, maybe
forever. No one saw in her going any significance. Spring had
come, and in preparation for the summer season the house at Fair
Harbor must be opened and set in order, and the presence there of
some one of the Page family was easily explained.

She made the three hours' run to Fair Harbor in her car, driving
it herself, and as the familiar landfalls fell into place, she
doubted if it would not have been wiser had she stayed away. For
she found that the memories of more than twenty summers at Fair
Harbor had been wiped out by those of one summer, by those of one
man. The natives greeted her joyously: the boatmen, the
fishermen, her own grooms and gardeners, the village postmaster,
the oldest inhabitant. They welcomed her as though they were her
vassals and she their queen. But it was the one man she had
exiled from Fair Harbor who at every turn wrung her heart and
caused her throat to tighten. She passed the cottage where he had
lodged, and hundreds of years seemed to have gone since she used
to wait for him in the street, blowing noisily on her automobile
horn, calling derisively to his open windows. Wherever she turned
Fair Harbor spoke of him. The golf-links; the bathing beach; the
ugly corner in the main street where he always reminded her that
it was better to go slow for ten seconds than to remain a long
time dead; the old house on the stone wharf where the schooners
made fast, which he intended to borrow for his honeymoon; the
wooden trough where they always drew rein to water the ponies;
the pond into which he had waded to bring her lilies.

On the second day of her stay she found she was passing these
places purposely, that to do so she was going out of her way.
They no longer distressed her, but gave her a strange comfort.
They were old friends, who had known her in the days when she was
rich in happiness.

But the secret hiding-place--their very own hiding-place, the
opening among the pines that overhung the jumble of rocks and the
sea--she could not bring herself to visit. And then, on the
afternoon of the third day when she was driving alone toward the
lighthouse, her pony, of his own accord, from force of habit,
turned smartly into the wood road. And again from force of habit,
before he reached the spot that overlooked the sea, he came to a
full stop. There was no need to make him fast. For hours,
stretching over many summer days, he had stood under those same
branches patiently waiting.

On foot, her heart beating tremulously, stepping reverently, as
one enters the aisle of some dim cathedral, Helen advanced into
the sacred circle. And then she stood quite still. What she had
expected to find there she could not have told, but it was gone.
The place was unknown to her. She saw an opening among gloomy
pines, empty, silent, unreal. No haunted house, no barren moor,
no neglected graveyard ever spoke more poignantly, more
mournfully, with such utter hopelessness. There was no sign of
his or of her former presence. Across the open space something
had passed its hand, and it had changed. What had been a
trysting-place, a bower, a nest, had become a tomb. A tomb, she
felt, for something that once had been brave, fine, and
beautiful, but which now was dead. She had but one desire, to
escape from the place, to put it away from her forever, to
remember it, not as she now found it, but as first she had
remembered it, and as now she must always remember It. She turned
softly on tiptoe as one who has intruded on a shrine.

But before she could escape there came from the sea a sudden gust
of wind that caught her by the skirts and drew her back, that set
the branches tossing and swept the dead leaves racing about her
ankles. And at the same instant from just above her head there
beat upon the air a violent, joyous tattoo--a sound that was
neither of the sea nor of the woods, a creaking, swiftly repeated
sound, like the flutter of caged wings.

Helen turned in alarm and raised her eyes--and beheld the
sailorman.

Tossing his arms in a delirious welcome, waltzing in a frenzy of
joy, calling her back to him with wild beckonings, she saw him
smiling down at her with the same radiant, beseeching,
worshipping smile. In Helen's ears Latimer's commands to the
sailorman rang as clearly as though Latimer stood before her and
had just spoken. Only now they were no longer a jest; they were a
vow, a promise, an oath of allegiance that brought to her peace,
and pride, and happiness.

"So long as I love this beautiful lady," had been his foolish
words, "you will guard this place. It is a life sentence!"

With one hand Helen Page dragged down the branch on which the
sailorman stood, with the other she snatched him from his post of
duty. With a joyous laugh that was a sob, she clutched the
sailorman in both her hands and kissed the beseeching,
worshipping smile.

An hour later her car, on its way to Boston, passed through Fair
Harbor at a rate of speed that caused her chauffeur to pray
between his chattering teeth that the first policeman would save
their lives by landing them in jail.

At the wheel, her shoulders thrown forward, her eyes searching
the dark places beyond the reach of the leaping head-lights Helen
Page raced against time, against the minions of the law, against
sudden death, to beat the midnight train out of Boston, to assure
the man she loved of the one thing that could make his life worth
living.

And close against her heart, buttoned tight beneath her
great-coat, the sailorman smiled in the darkness, his long watch
over, his soul at peace, his duty well performed.

Chapter 6. THE MIND READER

When Philip Endicott was at Harvard, he wrote stories of
undergraduate life suggested by things that had happened to
himself and to men he knew. Under the title of "Tales of the
Yard" they were collected in book form, and sold surprisingly
well. After he was graduated and became a reporter on the New
York Republic, he wrote more stories, in each of which a reporter
was the hero, and in which his failure or success in gathering
news supplied the plot. These appeared first in the magazines,
and later in a book under the title of "Tales of the Streets."
They also were well received.

Then came to him the literary editor of the Republic, and said:
"There are two kinds of men who succeed in writing fiction--men
of genius and reporters. A reporter can describe a thing he has
seen in such a way that he can make the reader see it, too. A man
of genius can describe something he has never seen, or any one
else for that matter, in such a way that the reader will exclaim:
'I have never committed a murder; but if I had, that's just the
way I'd feel about it.' For instance, Kipling tells us how a
Greek pirate, chained to the oar of a trireme, suffers; how a
mother rejoices when her baby crawls across her breast. Kipling
has never been a mother or a pirate, but he convinces you he
knows how each of them feels. He can do that because he is a
genius; you cannot do it because you are not. At college you
wrote only of what you saw at college; and now that you are in
the newspaper business all your tales are only of newspaper work.
You merely report what you see. So, if you are doomed to write
only of what you see, then the best thing for you to do is to see
as many things as possible. You must see all kinds of life. You
must progress. You must leave New York, and you had better go to
London."

"But on the Republic," Endicott pointed out, "I get a salary. And
in London I should have to sweep a crossing."

"Then," said the literary editor, "you could write a story about
a man who swept a crossing."

It was not alone the literary editor's words of wisdom that had
driven Philip to London. Helen Carey was in London, visiting the
daughter of the American Ambassador; and, though Philip had known
her only one winter, he loved her dearly. The great trouble was
that he had no money, and that she possessed so much of it that,
unless he could show some unusual quality of mind or character,
his asking her to marry him, from his own point of view at least,
was quite impossible. Of course, he knew that no one could love
her as he did, that no one so truly wished for her happiness, or
would try so devotedly to make her happy. But to him it did not
seem possible that a girl could be happy with a man who was not
able to pay for her home, or her clothes, or her food, who would
have to borrow her purse if he wanted a new pair of gloves or a
hair-cut. For Philip Endicott, while rich in birth and education
and charm of manner, had no money at all. When, in May, he came
from New York to lay siege to London and to the heart of Helen
Carey he had with him, all told, fifteen hundred dollars. That
was all he possessed in the world; and unless the magazines
bought his stories there was no prospect of his getting any more.

Friends who knew London told him that, if you knew London well,
it was easy to live comfortably there and to go about and even to
entertain modestly on three sovereigns a day. So, at that rate,
Philip calculated he could stay three months. But he found that
to know London well enough to be able to live there on three
sovereigns a day you had first to spend so many five-pound notes
in getting acquainted with London that there were no sovereigns
left. At the end of one month he had just enough money to buy him
a second-class passage back to New York, and he was as far from
Helen as ever.

Often he had read in stories and novels of men who were too poor
to marry. And he had laughed at the idea. He had always said that
when two people truly love each other it does not matter whether
they have money or not. But when in London, with only a
five-pound note, and face to face with the actual proposition of
asking Helen Carey not only to marry him but to support him, he
felt that money counted for more than he had supposed. He found
money was many different things--it was self-respect, and proper
pride, and private honors and independence. And, lacking these
things, he felt he could ask no girl to marry him, certainly not
one for whom he cared as he cared for Helen Carey. Besides, while
he knew how he loved her, he had no knowledge whatsoever that she
loved him. She always seemed extremely glad to see him; but that
might be explained in different ways. It might be that what was
in her heart for him was really a sort of "old home week"
feeling; that to her it was a relief to see any one who spoke her
own language, who did not need to have it explained when she was
jesting, and who did not think when she was speaking in perfectly
satisfactory phrases that she must be talking slang.

The Ambassador and his wife had been very kind to Endicott, and,
as a friend of Helen's, had asked him often to dinner and had
sent him cards for dances at which Helen was to be one of the
belles and beauties. And Helen herself had been most kind, and
had taken early morning walks with him in Hyde Park and through
the National Galleries; and they had fed buns to the bears in the
Zoo, and in doing so had laughed heartily. They thought it was
because the bears were so ridiculous that they laughed. Later
they appreciated that the reason they were happy was because they
were together. Had the bear pit been empty, they still would have
laughed.

On the evening of the thirty-first of May, Endicott had gone to
bed with his ticket purchased for America and his last five-pound
note to last him until the boat sailed. He was a miserable young
man. He knew now that he loved Helen Carey in such a way that to
put the ocean between them was liable to unseat his courage and
his self-control. In London he could, each night, walk through
Carlton House Terrace and, leaning against the iron rails of the
Carlton Club, gaze up at her window. But, once on the other side
of the ocean, that tender exercise must be abandoned. He must
even consider her pursued by most attractive guardsmen,
diplomats, and belted earls. He knew they could not love her as
he did; he knew they could not love her for the reasons he loved
her, because the fine and beautiful things in her that he saw and
worshipped they did not seek, and so did not find. And yet, for
lack of a few thousand dollars, he must remain silent, must put
from him the best that ever came into his life, must waste the
wonderful devotion he longed to give, must starve the love that
he could never summon for any other woman.

On the thirty-first of May he went to sleep utterly and
completely miserable. On the first of June he woke hopeless and
unrefreshed.

And then the miracle came.

Prichard, the ex-butler who valeted all the young gentlemen in
the house where Philip had taken chambers, brought him his
breakfast. As he placed the eggs and muffins on the tables to
Philip it seemed as though Prichard had said: "I am sorry he is
leaving us. The next gentleman who takes these rooms may not be
so open-handed. He never locked up his cigars or his whiskey. I
wish he'd give me his old dress-coat. It fits me, except across
the shoulders."

Philip stared hard at Prichard; but the lips of the valet had not
moved. In surprise and bewilderment, Philip demanded:

"How do you know it fits? Have you tried it on?"

"I wouldn't take such a liberty," protested Prichard. "Not with
any of our gentlemen's clothes."

"How did you know I was talking about clothes," demanded Philip.
"You didn't say anything about clothes, did you?"

"No, sir, I did not; but you asked me, sir, and I--"

"Were you thinking of clothes?"

"Well, sir, you might say, in a way, that I was, answered the
valet. "Seeing as you're leaving, sir, and they're not over-new,
I thought "

"It's mental telepathy," said Philip.

"I beg your pardon," exclaimed Prichard.

"You needn't wait," said Philip.

The coincidence puzzled him; but by the time he had read the
morning papers he had forgotten about it, and it was not until he
had emerged into the street that it was forcibly recalled. The
street was crowded with people; and as Philip stepped in among
them, It was as though every one at whom he looked began to talk
aloud. Their lips did not move, nor did any sound issue from
between them; but, without ceasing, broken phrases of thoughts
came to him as clearly as when, in passing in a crowd, snatches
of talk are carried to the ears. One man thought of his debts;
another of the weather, and of what disaster it might bring to
his silk hat; another planned his luncheon; another was rejoicing
over a telegram he had but that moment received. To himself he
kept repeating the words of the telegram--"No need to come, out
of danger." To Philip the message came as clearly as though he
were reading it from the folded slip of paper that the stranger
clutched in his hand.

Confused and somewhat frightened, and in order that undisturbed
he might consider what had befallen him, Philip sought refuge
from the crowded street in the hallway of a building. His first
thought was that for some unaccountable cause his brain for the
moment was playing tricks with him, and he was inventing the
phrases he seemed to hear, that he was attributing thoughts to
others of which they were entirely innocent. But, whatever it was
that had befallen him, he knew it was imperative that he should
at once get at the meaning of it.

The hallway in which he stood opened from Bond Street up a flight
of stairs to the studio of a fashionable photographer, and
directly in front of the hallway a young woman of charming
appearance had halted. Her glance was troubled, her manner ill at
ease. To herself she kept repeating: "Did I tell Hudson to be
here at a quarter to eleven, or a quarter past? Will she get the
telephone message to bring the ruff? Without the ruff it would be
absurd to be photographed. Without her ruff Mary Queen of Scots
would look ridiculous!"

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