The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me | Page 6

one half hour that I knew he wore nine dollar neckties and that I was for Roosevelt, the man nearly expired; he was that puzzled! I'm not quite the type of working girl whom Heaven protects and he chases, but--I mean I think he is wondering just how far Heaven really will protect my kind! When he decides," she confided in a final burst of laughter, and tucking away her overflowing red hair, "I may have to slap him--I mean don't you know--"
And we did know. And being in his late forties Henry began tantalizing me with odds on the Gilded Youth. He certainly was a beautiful boy--tall, chestnut haired, clean cut, and altogether charming. He played Brahms and Irving Berlin with equal grace on the piano in the women's lounge on the ship and an amazing game of stud poker with the San Francisco boys in the smoking room. And it was clear that he regarded the Eager Soul as a social adventure somewhat higher than his mother's social secretary--but of the same class. He was returning from a furlough, to drive his ambulance in France, and the Doctor was going out to join his unit somewhere in France down near the Joan of Arc country. He told us shyly one day, as we watched the wake of the ship together, that he was to be stationed at an old chateau upon whose front is carved in stone, "I serve because I am served!" When he did not repeat the motto we knew that it had caught him. He had been at home working on a germ problem connected with army life, hardly to be mentioned in the presence of Mrs. Boffin, and he was forever casually discussing his difficulties with the Eager Soul; and a stenographer, who came upon the two at their tete-a-tete one day, ran to the girls in the lounge and gasped, "My Lord, Net, if you'd a heard it, you'd a jumped off the boat!"
[Illustration with caption: She often paced the rounds of the deck between us]
As the passenger list began to resolve itself into familiar faces and figures and friends we became gradually aware of a pair of eyes--a pair of snappy black, female, French eyes. Speaking broadly and allowing for certain Emporia and Wichita exceptions, eyes were no treat to us. Yet we fell to talking blithely of those eyes. Henry said if he had to douse his cigar on deck at night, the captain should make the Princess wear dimmers at night or stay indoors. We were not always sure she was a Princess. At times she seemed more like a Duchess or a Countess, according to her clothes. We never had seen such clothes! And millinery! We were used to Broadway; Michigan Avenue did not make us shy, and Henry had been in the South. But these clothes and the hats and the eyes--all full dress--were too many for us. And we fell to speculating upon exactly what would happen on Main Street and Commercial Street in Wichita and Emporia if the Duchess could sail down there in full regalia. Henry's place at table was where he got the full voltage of the eyes every time the Princess switched them on. And whenever he reached for the water and gulped it down, one could know he had been jolted behind his ordinary resisting power. And he drank enough to float a ship! As we wended our weary way over the decks during the long lonely hours of the voyage, we fell to theorizing about those eyes and we concluded that they were Latin--Latin chiefly engaged in the business of being female eyes. It was a new show to us. Our wives and mothers had voted at city elections for over thirty years and had been engaged for a generation in the business of taming their husbands; saving the meat from dinner for the hash for breakfast, and betimes for diversion, working in their clubs for the good of their towns; and their eyes had visions in them, not sex. So these female eyes showed us a mystery! And each of us in his heart decided to investigate the phenomena. And on the seventh day we laid off from our work and called it good. We had met the Princess. Our closer view persuaded us that she might be thirty-five but probably was forty, though one early morning in a passage way we met her when she looked fifty, wan and sad and weary, but still flashing her eyes. And then one fair day, she turned her eyes from us for ever. This is what happened to me. But Henry himself may have been the hero of the episode. Anyway, one of us was walking the deck with the Countess investigating