The Tin Soldier | Page 7

squeezed her hand
in those breathless moments where words would have been desecration,
and wiped his eyes frankly when his feelings were stirred.
"There is no one like you, Daddy," she had told him, "to enjoy things."
And so it had come about that he had pushed away his work on certain
nights and, sitting beside her, had forgotten the sordid and suffering
world which he knew so well, and which she knew not at all.
As her eyes swept the house, they rested at last with a rather puzzled
look on a stout old gentleman with a wide shirt-front, who sat in the
right-hand box. He had white hair and a red face.
Where had she seen him?
There were women in the box, a sparkling company in white and silver,
and black and diamonds, and green and gold. There was a big
bald-headed man, and quite in the shadow back of them all, a slender
youth.
It was when the slender youth leaned forward to speak to the vision in
white and silver that Jean stared and stared again.
She knew now where she had seen the old gentleman with the wide
shirt front. He was the shabby old gentleman of the Toy Shop! And the
youth was the shabby son!
Yet here they were in state and elegance! As if a fairy godmother had
waved a wand--!
The curtain went up on a feverish little slavey with her mind set on
going to the ball, on Our Policeman wanting a shave, on the orphans in
boxes, on baked potato offered as hospitality by a half-starved hostess,
on a waiting Cinderella asleep on a frozen doorstep.
And then the ball--and Mona Lisa, and the Duchess of Devonshire, and

The Girl with the Pitcher and the Girl with the Muff--and Cinderella in
azure tulle and cloth-of-gold, dancing with the Prince at the end like
mad--.
Then the bell boomed--the lights went out--and after a little moment,
one saw Cinderella, stripped of her finery, staggering up the stairs.
Jean cried and laughed, and cried again. Yet even in the midst of her
emotion, she found her eyes pulled away from that appealing figure on
the stage to those faintly illumined figures in the box.
When the curtain went down, her father, most surprisingly, bowed to
the old gentleman and received in return a genial nod.
"Oh, do you know him?" she demanded.
"Yes. It is General Drake."
"Who are the others?"
"I am not sure about the women. The boy in the back of the box is his
son, DeRhymer Drake."
Derry!
"Oh,"--she had a feeling that she was not being quite candid with her
father--"he's rather swank, isn't he, Daddy?"
"Heavens, what slang! I don't see where you get it. He is rich, if that's
what you mean, and it's a wonder he isn't spoiled to death. His mother
is dead, and the General is his own worst enemy; eats and drinks too
much, and thinks he can get away with it."
"Are they very rich--?"
"Millions, with only Derry to leave it to. He's the child of a second
wife."
Oh, lovely, lovely, lovely Cinderella, could your godmother do more

than this? To endow two rained-on and shabby gentlemen with pomp
and circumstance!
Jean tucked her hand into her father's, as if to anchor herself against
this amazing tide of revelation. Then, as the auditorium darkened, and
the curtain went up, she was swept along on a wave of emotions in
which the play world and the real world were inextricably mixed.
And now Our Policeman discovers that he is "romantical." Cinderella
finds her Prince, who isn't in the least the Prince of the fairy tale, but
much nicer under the circumstance--and the curtain goes down on a
glass slipper stuck on the toes of two tiny feet and a cockney Cinderella,
quite content.
"Well," Jean drew a long breath. "It was the loveliest ever, Daddy," she
said, as he helped her with her cloak.
And it was while she stood there in that cloak of heavenly blue that the
young man in the box looked down and saw her.
He batted his eyes.
Of course she wasn't real.
But when he opened them, there she was, smiling up into the face of
the man who had helped her into that heavenly garment.
It came to him, quite suddenly, that his father had bowed to the
man--the big man with the classic head and the air of being at ease with
himself and the world.
He did things to the velvet and ermine wrap that he was holding, which
seemed to satisfy its owner, then he gripped his father's arm. "Dad, who
is that big man down there--with the red head--the one who bowed to
you?"
"Dr. McKenzie, Bruce McKenzie,