are the loveliest thing that I have ever known.”
“Oh.” She thought this over. “Of course I had no business to let you come on board. I might have known what we’d talk about—in this moon. But I can’t sit here and look at the shore—forever. I’m too young for that. Don’t you think I’m too young for that?”
“Much too young,” he agreed solemnly.
Suddenly they both became aware of new music that was close at hand, music that seemed to come out of the water not a hundred yards away.
“Listen!” she cried. “It’s from the Minnehaha. They’ve finished dinner.”
For a moment they listened in silence.
“Thank you,” said Val suddenly.
“For what?”
He hardly knew he had spoken. He was thanking the deep low horns for singing in the breeze, the sea for its warm murmurous complaint against the bow, the milk of the stars for washing over them until he felt buoyed up in a substance more taut than air.
“So lovely,” she whispered.
“What are we going to do about it?”
“Do we have to do something about it? I thought we could just sit and enjoy——”
“You didn’t think that,” he interrupted quietly. “You know that we must do something about it. I am going to make love to you—and you are going to be glad.”
“I can’t,” she said very low. She wanted to laugh now, to make some light cool remark that would bring the situation back into the safe waters of a casual flirtation. But it was too late now. Val knew that the music had completed what the moon had begun.
“I will tell you the truth,” he said. “You are my first love. I am seventeen—the same age as you, no more.”
There was something utterly disarming about the fact that they were the same age. It made her helpless before the fate that had thrown them together. The deck chairs creaked and he was conscious of a faint illusive perfume as they swayed suddenly and childishly together.
III
Whether he kissed her once or several times he could not afterward remember, though it must have been an hour that they sat there close together and he held her hand. What surprised him most about making love was that it seemed to have no element of wild passion—regret, desire, despair—but a delirious promise of such happiness in the world, in living, as he had never known. First love—this was only first love! What must love itself in its fullness, its perfection be. He did not know that what he was experiencing then, that unreal, undesirous medley of ecstasy and peace, would be unrecapturable forever.
The music had ceased for some time when presently the murmurous silence was broken by the sound of a rowboat disturbing the quiet waves. She sprang suddenly to her feet and her eyes strained out over the bay.
“Listen!” she said quickly. “I want you to tell me your name.”
“No.”
“Please,” she begged him. “I’m going away tomorrow.”
He didn’t answer.
“I don’t want you to forget me,” she said. “My name is——”
“I won’t forget you. I will promise to remember you always. Whoever I may love I will always compare her to you, my first love. So long as I live you will always have that much freshness in my heart.”
“I want you to remember,” she murmured brokenly. “Oh, this has meant more to me than it has to you—much more.”
She was standing so close to him that he felt her warm young breath on his face. Once again they swayed together. He pressed her hands and wrists between his as it seemed right to do, and kissed her lips. It was the right kiss, he thought, the romantic kiss—not too little or too much. Yet there was a sort of promise in it of other kisses he might have had, and it was with a slight sinking of his heart that he heard the rowboat close to the yacht and realized that her family had returned. The evening was over.
“And this is only the beginning,” he told himself. “All my life will be like this night.”
She was saying something in a low quick voice and he was listening tensely.
“You must know one thing—I am married. Three months ago. That was the mistake that I was thinking about when the moon brought you out here. In a moment you will understand.”
She broke off as the boat swung against the companionway and a man’s voice floated up out of the darkness.
“Is that you, my dear?”
“Yes.”
“What is this other rowboat waiting?”
“One of Mrs. Jackson’s guests came here my mistake and I made him stay and amuse me for an hour.”
A moment later the thin white hair and weary face of a man of sixty appeared above the level of the deck. And then Val saw and realized too late how much he cared.
IV
When the Riviera season ended in May the Rostoffs and all the other Russians closed their villas and went north for the summer. The Russian Orthodox Church was locked up and so were the bins of rarer wine, and the fashionable spring moonlight was put away, so to speak, to wait for their return.
“We’ll be back next season,” they said as a matter of course.
But this was premature, for they were never coming back anymore. Those few who straggled south again after five tragic years were glad to get work as chambermaids or valets de chambre in the great hotels where they had once dined. Many of them, of course, were killed in the war or in the revolution; many of them faded out as spongers and small cheats in the big capitals, and not a few ended their lives in a sort of stupefied despair.
When the Kerensky government collapsed in 1917, Val was a lieutenant on the eastern front, trying desperately to enforce authority in his company long after any vestige of it remained. He was still trying when Prince Paul Rostoff and his wife gave up their lives one rainy morning to atone for the blunders of the Romanoffs—and the enviable career of Morris Hasylton’s daughter ended in a city that bore even more resemblance to a butcher shop than had Chicago in 1892.
After that Val fought with Denikin’s army for a while until he realized that he was participating in a hollow farce and the glory of Imperial Russia was over. Then he went to France and was suddenly confronted with the astounding problem of keeping his body and soul together.
It was, of course, natural that he should think of going to America. Two vague aunts with whom his mother had quarreled many years ago still lived there in comparative affluence. But the idea was repugnant to the prejudices his mother had implanted in him, and besides he hadn’t sufficient money left to pay for his passage over. Until a possible counter-revolution should restore to him the Rostoff properties in Russia he must somehow keep alive in France.
So he went to the little city he knew best of all.
