We Cant Have Everything | Page 3

and yet somehow had the opposite effect.
His shoes were thick-soled but unquestionably expensive, his clothes of loose, rough stuff manifestly fashionable. Like them, he had a kind of burly grace. He had been used to a well-upholstered life.
He was one of those giants that often grow in rich men's homes. His father was such another, and his mother suggested the Statue of Liberty in corsets and on high heels.
Dyckman was reading a weekly journal devoted to horses and dogs, and reading with such interest that he hardly knew when the train stopped.
He did not see the woman who got out of a motor and got into the train, and whose small baggage the porter put in the empty place opposite his. He did not see that she leaned into the aisle and regarded him with a pathetic amusement in her caressing eyes. She took her time about making herself known; then she uttered only a discreet:
"Ahem!"
She put into the cough many subtle implications. Hardly more could be crowded into a shrug.
Dyckman came out of his kennels and paddocks, blinked, stared, gaped. Then he began to stand up by first stepping down. He bestrode the narrow aisle like a Colossus.
He caught her two hands, brought them together, placed them in one of his, and covered them with the other as in a big muff, and bent close to pour into her eyes such ardor that for a moment she closed hers against the flame.
Then, as if in that silent greeting their souls had made a too loud and startling noise of welcome, both of them looked about with an effect of surreptition and alarm.
There were not many people in the car, and they were absorbed in their own books, gossips, or naps. Only a few head-tops showing above the high-backed seats, and no eyes or ears.
"Do you know anybody on the train?" the woman asked.
The man shook his head and sank into the seat opposite her, still clinging to her hands. She extricated them:
"But everybody knows you."
He dismissed this with a sniff of reproof. Then they settled down in the small trench and seemed to take a childish delight in the peril of their rencounter.
"Lord, but it's good to see you!" he sighed, luxuriously. "And you're stunninger than ever!"
"I'm a sight!" she said.
She was clad even more plainly than he, and had the same spirit of neglectful elegance. She was big, too, for a woman; somewhat lank but well muscled, and decisive in her motions as if she normally abounded in strength. What grace she had was an athlete's, but she looked overtrained or undernourished. Seeing that she did not look well, Dyckman said:
"How well you're looking, Charity."
She did not look like Charity, either; but her name had been given to her before she was born. There had nearly always been a girl called Charity in the Coe family. They had brought the name with them from New England when they settled in Westchester County some two hundred years before. They had kept little of their Puritanism except a few of the names.
This sportswoman called Charity had been trying to live up to her name, of late. That was why she was haggard. She smiled at her friend's unmerited praise.
"Thanks, Jim. I need a compliment like the devil."
"Where've you been since you got back?"
"Up in the camp, trying to get a little rest and exercise. But it's too lonesome nights. I rest better when I keep on the jump."
"You're in black; that doesn't mean--?"
She shook her head. A light of eagerness in his eyes was quenched, and he growled:
"Too bad!" He could afford to say it, since the object of his obloquy was alive. If the person mentioned had not been alive, the phrase he used would have been the same more gently intoned.
Charity protested: "Shame on you! I know you mean it for flattery, but you mustn't, you really mustn't. I'm in black for--for Europe." She laughed pitifully at the conceit.
He answered, with admiring awe: "I've heard about you. You're a wonder; that's what you are, Charity Coe, a wonder. Here's a big hulk like me loafing around trying to kill time, and a little tike like you over there in France spending a fortune of money and more strength than even you've got in a slaughter-house of a war hospital. How did you stand it?"
"It wasn't much fun," she sighed, "but the nurses can't feel sorry for themselves when they see--what they see."
"I can imagine," he said.
But he could not have imagined her as she daily had been. She and the other princesses of blood royal or bourgeois had been moiling among the red human débris of war, the living garbage of battle, as the wagons and trains emptied it into the receiving stations.
She and they had stood till