The Blower of Bubbles Part 28

He smiled sadly. "They are," he said.

She sighed sympathetically. "Poor gentlemen!" she murmured.

After that the comedians sang a duet, the words of which dealt with marital infidelity, that screamingly funny subject on which the stage of to-day builds its humorous efforts. Once the verse ended with an innuendo so crude that a gathering of navvies might have resented it.

There was a laugh and a gasp from the audience--then wild applause; the song could not go on for the riot of appreciation. One of the comedians (who had sung it only three hundred and fifteen times) tried to commence the next verse, but was suddenly overcome with laughter himself. The guffaws became a barrage; then, as the other singer turned abruptly about, his shoulders heaving convulsively, the din grew to drum-fire and was deafening. How richly humorous! It was really too much! People held their sides and gasped for breath.--"Have you seen _Oh Aunt_? My dear, it is _too_ killing for words."

Up in the gallery one man sat with an unsmiling face. He was a wounded Tommy who had been blown from a ditch to the top of a barn, and from the barn to another ditch. He had had his fill of slapstick comedy.

When the song was over there were shrieks of forced, girlish laughter, and nearly forty young women in various stages of dishabille rushed on the stage, exhibiting to a critical audience the charms and the defects of their forty individual forms. The producer had been both daring and sparing. He was a second-rate burlesque manager in New York, but London, that great haven for American mediocrity, recognized his genius, and gave him a chance. He knew the value of a chorus, and how to get the best out of them--oh, he knew!

"Monsieur."

The officer turned slowly and looked at the girl beside him. Her face was flushed and her eyes stared at the ground.

"Yes, little one?"

"Please--take me away."

Without questioning her further, he reached for his cap, and amid the wondering glances of the people around, they left the theater. He paused in the foyer and put on his gloves.

"I am sorry, Pippa," he said gravely.

Her hand stole soothingly into his arm, and both of them, unknown to each other, experienced a feeling that he was the younger of the two.

After all, every woman is a potential mother, and men are only boys grown serious; so she comforted him with the touch of her hand, and--perhaps it was the natural contraction in putting on the glove--his arm pressed hers tight to his side.

And though he was a man, he understood. It is not precept or preaching that teaches it. Modesty in a girl is instinctive; and the little lady from the mill-house had known no other teacher than instinct.

Outside the theater an attendant was changing the performance number of _Oh Aunt!_ from 316 to 317.

X

Twenty minutes later, in the large tea-rooms of a fas.h.i.+onable hotel just off the Strand, there was a murmur of interest as a flying-officer, quizzically dejected of countenance, entered with a young lady, who glanced shyly about, and whose fingers held his, timidly but confidingly.

He secured a table, and ordered tea from a pleasant waitress. This accomplished, he said something to his companion, who was sitting bolt-upright, keeping a steady gaze on her hands crossed on her lap.

Smiling a little, she slowly raised her face and looked into his. A young Canadian subaltern, seated at a table with a woman whose overpowdered, meaningless beauty was only too eloquent, stopped in some remark he was making. Something in the French girl's face had sent his mind, smitten with loneliness, speeding across the Atlantic to a home whence a mother and a sister had sent the finest thing they had across the seas.

Near them, two girls, fresh of face, t.i.ttered and posed, challenging the eyes of every man who entered, with a brazen immodesty strangely at variance with their appearance of decent breeding. At a farther table a young woman, with a beauty that was marred by too hard a mouth, sat with her mother and listened to that woman's urging that she should marry a wealthy Jew who had asked for her hand. Was it not her duty to herself and to her mother? Besides, even if that young fellow did come back uncrippled from the trenches--which was unlikely--he would have to begin all over again. Alone, a good-looking artist, discharged from the army with wounds, sat with an insouciant, mocking eye, searching for types and adventure. Around him women of all ages, some of them with men, smoked, while their chatter mixed discordantly with the orchestra playing some negroid ragtime piece, and with the sound of rattling tea-cups.

"Your Majesty," said the miller's niece, relapsing into her former style of address, "there is so much I cannot understand."

"Such as what, youngster?"

"These ladies here. Some are so pretty and so nice. Others are pretty and----" Again she shrugged her shoulders as only a French woman can.

"I am so young, it is true--but see that lady there."

"With the young Canadian--yes?"

"Somehow, monsieur, she frightens me. I did not know that women ever looked that way--like Louis when he catches a mouse."

"The simile is very apt, Pippa."

"But then"--her brows puckered with a first endeavor to harness language to her psychology--"you can see that nice girl there, so fair and pink."

"I prefer them dark," said he seriously; "but what of her?"

The expounder of philosophy breathed deeply, but stuck to her task.

"I think," she said, "that the fair girl is nice, but this one is ..."

(shrug) ... "Then why, monsieur, does the nice one try to look just like the other?--_Regardez-moi ca_--see her now."

He poured out the tea, which had just arrived.

"Shall I tell you a story?" he asked.

She sighed happily. "Tell me a true story," she said with that insistence of the young on making all things believable.

He sipped his tea and frowned meditatively.

"Not long ago, my dear, there lived a stupid king."

"Your father?"

"In any one but you, Pippa, that would be pert. No, he was not my father."

"I wonder if Louis----" she began, but he checked her with a portentous frown.

"Once," he began again, "there lived a stupid king named Convention."

"What a silly name!"

"Pippa!" he admonished her with a warning finger.

She tried to look serious, but ended by laughing mischievously.

"There was a stupid king with a silly name?" she said encouragingly.

"This king," he said, "was very wise in some things, and often kind, but his courtiers were a poor lot--Hypocrisy, Sn.o.bbery, Good and Bad Form, and a lot of others. Now the king used to favor the men among his subjects."

"You mean, he liked men?"

"Yes."

"So do I," she said in an outburst of frankness. "They are so droll."

He poured some fresh tea into the cups.