The Beauty and the Bolshevist | Page 6

"I gave him a stroke a hole, and he's twenty years younger than I am--well, fifteen anyhow. The trouble with these young men is that they lack--"
Ben never heard what it was that young men lacked.
Next came a boy and a girl, talking eagerly, the girl's hand gesticulating at her round, red lips. Ben had no scruples in overhearing them--theirs appeared to be the universal secret. But here again he was wrong. She was saying: "Round and round--not up and down. My dentist says that if you always brush them round and round--"
Then two young men--boys, with cigarettes drooping from their lips; they were saying, "I haven't pitched a game since before the war, but he said to go in and get that Tiverton fellow, and so--" Ben saw that he was in the presence of the hero of the late game. He forgave him, too.
As a matter of fact, he had never given the fashionable world enough attention to hate it. He knew that Leo Klein derived a very revivifying antagonism from reading about it, and often bought himself an entrance to the opera partly because he loved music, but partly, Ben always thought, because he liked to look up at the boxes and hate the occupants for their jewels and inattention. But Ben watched the spectacle with as much detachment as he would have watched a spring dance among the Indians.
And then suddenly his detachment melted away, for a lovely girl came through the window--lovely with that particular and specific kind of loveliness which Ben thought of when he used the word--his kind. He used to wonder afterward how he had known it at that first glimpse, for, in the dim light of the piazza, he could not see some of her greatest beauties--the whiteness of her skin, white as milk where her close, fine, brown hair began, or the blue of the eyes set at an angle which might have seemed Oriental in eyes less enchanting turquoise in color. But he could see her slenderness and grace. She was dressed in clinging blues and greens and she wore a silver turban. She leaned her hands on the railings--she turned them out along the railings; they were slender and full of character--not soft. Ben looked at the one nearest him. With hardly more than a turn of his head he could have kissed it. The idea appealed to him strongly; he played with it, just as when he was a child in a college town he had played with the idea of getting up in church and walking about on the backs of the pews. This would be pleasanter, and the subsequent getaway even easier. He glanced at the dark lawn behind him; there appeared to be no obstacle to escape.
Perhaps, under the spell of her attraction for him, and the knowledge that he would never see her again, he might actually have done it, but she broke the trance by speaking to a tall, stolid young man who was with her.
"No, Eddie," she said, as if answering something he had said some time ago, "I really was at home, at just the time I said, only this new butler does hate you so--"
"You might speak to him about it--you might even get rid of him," replied the young man, in the tone of one deeply imposed upon.
"Good butlers are so rare nowadays."
"And are devoted friends so easy to find?"
"No, but a good deal easier than butlers, Eddie dear."
The young man gave an exclamation of annoyance. "Let us find some place out of the way. I want to speak to you seriously--" he began, and they moved out of earshot--presumably to a secluded spot of Eddie's choosing.
When they had gone Ben felt distinctly lonely, and, what was more absurd, slighted, as if Eddie had deliberately taken the girl away from him--out of reach. How silly, he thought, for Eddie to want to talk to her, when it was so clear the fellow did not know how to talk to her. How silly to say, in the sulky tone, "Are devoted friends so easy to find?" Of course they were--for a girl like that--devoted friends, passionate lovers, and sentimental idiots undoubtedly blocked her path.
It might have been some comfort to him to know that in the remote spot of his own choosing, a stone bench under a purple beech, Eddie was simply going from bad to worse.
"Dear Crystal," he began, with that irritating reasonableness of manner which implies that the speaker is going to be reasonable for two, "I've been thinking over the situation. I know that you don't love me, but then I don't believe you will ever be deeply in love with any one. I don't think you are that kind of woman."
"Oh, Eddie, how dreadful!"
"I don't