Winnie Childs, the Shop Girl. C. N. Williamson
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than the professional. They were, to be sure, theoretically able to take exercise at certain hours, weather permitting; but weather did not permit, and four of the dryads, when free, sought distraction in lying down rather than walking. It was only the fifth who would not take the weather's "no" for an answer.
She had a mackintosh, and with her head looking very small and neat, wound in a brown veil the colour of her hair, she joined the brigade of the strong men and women who defied the winds by night. From eight to ten she staggered and slid up and down the wet length of the least-frequented deck, or flopped and gasped joyously for a few minutes in an unclaimed chair.
Being "not a bit like the rest" of her sister dryads, she refrained from mentioning this habit to Mr. Rolls, whose prowling place was on higher decks. Not that she was still what he would have called "standoffish" with him. That would have been silly and Victorian after the grapefruit and chocolates and novels, to say nothing of balm by the bottleful. The last dress she had worn on the first day of their acquaintance, the "Yielding Heart," had to a certain extent prophesied her attitude with the one man who knocked at the dryad door. Miss Child not only thought Mr. Rolls "might be rather nice," but was almost sure he was. She was nice to him, too, in dryad land, when he paid his visits to the sisterhood, but she did not "belong on his deck."
By and by, however, he discovered her in the mackintosh and veil. It was one night when a young playwright who had seized on him as prey wished to find a quiet place to be eloquent about the plot.
"There's a deck two below," said the aspirant for fame, "where nobody prowls except a young female panther tied up in a veil."
Five minutes later Peter Rolls took off his cap to the female panther. The playwright noticed this, but was too much interested in himself and the hope of securing a capitalist to care. In sketching out his comedy he was blind to any other possibilities of drama, and so did not see Peter's eagerness to get rid of him. He was even pleased when, after a few compliments, Rolls junior said: "Look here, you'd better leave me to think over what you've told me. I fix things in my memory that way. And maybe when I've got it straight in my head I'll—er—mention it to a man I know."
As the playwright was shivering, he obeyed with alacrity; and in the warmth of the smoking-room revelled in the picture of his tame capitalist pacing a cold deck, lost to the sea's welter in thoughts of that marvellous last act.
But it was a first act which was engaging Peter Rolls's attention, and he, though the only male character in it (by choice), had to learn his part as he went on.
The play began by his joining the leading lady. (This has been done before, but seldom with such a lurch and on such sloping boards.)
It would have been a mockery to say "good evening" on a night so vile, and Mr. Rolls began by asking Miss Child if he might walk with her.
"Or tango," said she. "This deck is teaching me some wonderful new steps."
"I wish you'd teach them to me," said Peter.
"I can't, but the ship can."
"Did you ever dance the tango?" he wanted to know.
"Yes. In another state of existence."
This silenced him for an instant. Then he skipped at least two speeches ahead, whither his thoughts had flown. "Say, Miss Child, I wish you'd tell me something about yourself."
"There isn't anything interesting to tell, thank you, Mr. Rolls."
"If that's your only reason, I think you might let me judge. Honestly, I don't want to intrude or be curious. But you're so different from the others."
"I know I'm not pretty. That's why I have to be so painfully sweet. I got the engagement only by a few extra inches. Luckily it isn't the face matters so much," she chattered on. "I thought it was. But it's legs; their being long; Mme. Nadine engages on that and your figure being right for the dresses of the year. So many pretty girls come in short or odd lengths, you find, when they have to be measured by the yard, at bargain price."
Peter laughed.
"You're not meant to laugh there," she said. "It's a solemn fact."
"But you always laugh."
"That's because I'm what you'd call 'up against' life. It gives me such a funny point of view."
"That's part of what I want to talk about. Please don't keep trying to turn the subject. Unless you think I have no business seizing the first chance when I find you alone, to––"
"It isn't that," said Win. "I think you're very kind to take the slightest interest. But really there is nothing to tell. Just the usual sort of thing."
"It doesn't seem exactly usual to me for a girl about nineteen years old––"
"Twenty!"
"—to be leaving home alone and starting for a new country."
"Not alone. Mme. Nadine might be furious if she were spoken of as my chaperon; but she is, all the same. Not that an emigrant needs a chaperon."
"You an emigrant!"
"Well, what else am I?"
"I've been thinking of you as a dryad."
"A poor, drenched dryad, thousands of miles from her native woods. Do you know, my veil is soaked?"
"I'll get you a sou'wester hat to-morrow."
"Does the barber keep them as well as Balm of Gilead?"
"No, but my sister does. She keeps one. And she doesn't want it. I shall annex it."
"Oh! I couldn't take it!"
"If you don't, I'll throw it overboard."
"Were the chocolates hers?"
"Yes."
"And the books?"
"Some were mine. But not the ones Miss Devereux says are pretty. Look here, Miss Child, another thing she says is that you are not with Nadine as a permanence. What does that mean, if you don't much mind my asking?"
"Not what you think. I'm not going to be discharged. I was engaged only for the voyage, to take the place of a prettier girl with still longer legs who fell through at the last moment—literally. She stepped into one of those gas-hole places in the street. And I stepped into her shoes—lucky shoes!—sort of seven-league ones, bringing me across the sea, all the way to New York free, for nothing. No! I hope not for nothing. I hope it is to make my fortune."
"I hope so, too," said Peter gravely. "Got any friends there besides me?"
"Thanks for putting it so, Mr. Balm of Gilead. Why, I've heard that everybody in America is ready to be a friend to lonely strangers!"
"I guess your informant was almost too much of an optimist. Couldn't you be serious for just a minute? You know, I feel quite well acquainted with you—and the others, of course. But they are different. And they are 'permanences' with Nadine. That's the kind of thing they're fit for. I don't worry about them, and I shan't worry about you, either, if you tell me you have friends or know what you are going to do when you land."
"I can't tell you that," Win answered in a changed tone, as if suddenly she were weary of trying to "frivol." "But I have hopes; and I have two letters of introduction and a respectable, recommended boarding-house and a little money left, so I really believe I shall be all right, thank you. My people thought my wanting to come showed 'my wild spirit,' so I'm anxious to prove as soon as I can—not to them any more, but to myself—that I can live my own life in a new world without coming to grief."
"Why not prove to them any more?"
"Oh—because no one is going to care much. As I said, my native woods are far behind, and most of the trees are cut down. Not a dryad of the true dryad family left, and this one is practically forgotten already. Her niche was all grown over with new bark long ago, so it was more than time she ceased to haunt the place."
"I'm afraid you've had a great sorrow," said Peter.