were the appetites of healthy wolves; theirs was the thirst of the marooned on waterless islands; and theirs, too, was the feverish gaiety of those who had escaped great peril by land and sea; and who were still physically and morally demoralized by the glare and the roar of the hellish conflagration which was still burning up the world around them.
So they met in a private dining room of the hotel for dinner on the eve of separation.
Brisson and Estridge had resurrected from their luggage the remains of their evening attire; Ilse and Palla had shopped; and they now included in a limited wardrobe two simple dinner gowns, among more vital purchases.
There were flowers on the table, no great variety of food but plenty of champagne to make up––a singular innovation in apology for short rations conceived by the hotel proprietor.
There was a victrola in the corner, too, and this they kept going to stimulate their nerves, which already were sufficiently on edge without the added fillip of music and champagne.
“As for me,” said Brisson, “I’m in sight of nervous dissolution already;––I’m going back to my wife and children, thank God––” he smiled at Palla. “I’m grateful to the God you don’t believe in, dear little lady. And if He is willing, I’ll report for duty in two weeks.” He turned to Estridge:
“What about you?”
“I’ve cabled for orders but I have none yet. If they’re through with me I shall go back to New York and back to the medical school I came from. I hate the idea, too. Lord, how I detest it!”
“Why?” asked Palla nervously.
23
“I’ve had too much excitement. You have too––and so have Ilse and Brisson. I’m not keen for the usual again. It bores me to contemplate it. The thought of Fifth Avenue––the very idea of going back to all that familiar routine, social and business, makes me positively ill. What a dull place this world will be when we’re all at peace again!”
“We won’t be at peace for a long, long while,” said Ilse, smiling. She lifted a goblet in her big, beautifully shaped hand and drained it with the vigorous grace of a Viking’s daughter.
“You think the war is going to last for years?” asked Estridge.
“Oh, no; not this war. But the other,” she explained cheerfully.
“What other?”
“Why, the greatest conflict in the world; the social war. It’s going to take many years and many battles. I shall enlist.”
“Nonsense,” said Brisson, “you’re not a Red!”
The girl laughed and showed her snowy teeth: “I’m one kind of Red––not the kind that sold Russia to the boche––but I’m very, very red.”
“Everybody with a brain and a heart is more or less red in these days,” nodded Palla. “Everybody knows that the old order is ended––done for. Without liberty and equal opportunity civilisation is a farce. Everybody knows it except the stupid. And they’ll have to be instructed.”
“Very well,” said Brisson briskly, “here’s to the universal but bloodless revolution! An acre for everybody and a mule to plough it! Back to the soil and to hell with the counting house!”
They all laughed, but their brimming glasses went 24 up; then Estridge rose to re-wind the victrola. Palla’s slim foot tapped the parquet in time with the American fox-trot; she glanced across the table at Estridge, lifted her head interrogatively, then sprang up and slid into his arms, delighted.
While they danced he said: “Better go light on that champagne, Miss Dumont.”
“Don’t you think I can keep my head?” she demanded derisively.
“Not if you keep up with Ilse. You’re not built that way.”
“I wish I were. I wish I were nearly six feet tall and beautiful in every limb and feature as she is. What wonderful children she could have! What magnificent hair she must have had before she sheared it for the Woman’s Battalion! Now it’s all a dense, short mass of gold––she looks like a lovely boy who requires a barber.”
“Your hair is not unbecoming, either,” he remarked, “––short as it is, it’s a mop of curls and very fetching.”
“Isn’t it funny?” she said. “I sheared mine for the sake of Mother Church; Ilse cut off hers for the honour of the Army! Now we’re both out of a job––with only our cropped heads to show for the experience!––and no more army and no more church––at least, as far as I am concerned!”
And she threw back hers with its thick, glossy curls and laughed, looking up at him out of her virginal brown eyes of a child.
“I’m sorry I cut my hair,” she added presently. “I look like a Bolshevik.”
“It’s growing very fast,” he said encouragingly.
“Oh, yes, it grows fast,” she nodded indifferently. “Shall we return to the table? I am rather thirsty.”
25
Ilse and Brisson were engaged in an animated conversation when they reseated themselves. The waiter arrived about that time with another course of poor food.
Palla, disregarding Estridge’s advice, permitted the waiter to refill her glass.
“I can’t eat that unappetising entrée,” she insisted, “and champagne, they say, is nourishing and I’m still hungry.”
“As you please,” said Brisson; “but you’ve had two glasses already.”
“I don’t care,” she retorted childishly; “I mean to live to the utmost in future. For the first time in my silly existence I intend to be natural. I wonder what it feels like to become a little intoxicated?”
“It feels rotten,” remarked Estridge.
“Really? How rotten?” She laughed again, laid her hand on the goblet’s stem and glanced across at him defiantly, mischievously. However, she seemed to reconsider the matter, for she picked up a cigarette and lighted it at a candle.
“Bah!” she exclaimed with a wry face. “It stings!”
But she ventured another puff or two before placing it upon a saucer among its defunct fellows.
“Ugh!” she complained again with a gay little shiver, and bit into a pear as though to wash out the contamination of unaccustomed nicotine.
“Where are you going when we all say good-bye?” inquired Estridge.
“I? Oh, I’m certainly going home on the first Danish boat––home to Shadow Hill, where I told you I lived.”
“And you have nobody but your aunt?”
“Only that one old lady.”
26
