The Tin Soldier | Page 7

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, the nerve specialist--"
Of course it was something to know that, but one didn't get very far.
"Let's go somewhere and eat," said the General, and that was the end of it. Out of the tail of his eye, Derry Drake saw the two figures with the copper-colored heads move down the aisle, to be finally merged into the indistinguishable stream of humanity which surged towards the door.
Jean and her father did not go to supper at the big hotel around the corner as was their custom.
"I've got to get to the hospital before twelve," the Doctor said. "I am sorry, dear--"
"It doesn't make a bit of difference. I don't want to eat," she settled herself comfortably beside him in the car. "Oh, it is snowing, Daddy, how splendid--"
He laughed. "You little bundle of--ecstasy--what am I going to do with you?"
"Love me. And isn't the snow--wonderful?"
"Yes. But everybody doesn't see it that way."
"I am glad that I do. I should hate to see nothing in all this miracle, but--slush tomorrow--"
"Yet a lot of life is just--slush tomorrow--. I wish you need never find that out--."
When Jean went into the house, and her father drove on, she found Hilda waiting up for her.
"Father had to go to the hospital."
"Did you have anything to eat?"
"No."
"I thought I might cook some oysters."
"I am really not hungry." Then feeling that her tone was ungracious, she tried to make amends. "It was nice of you to think of it--"
"Your father may like them. I'll have them hot for him."
Jean lingered uncertainly. She didn't want the food, but she hated to leave the