“I can’t be sure. That’s what I was considering when you came along.”
“Perhaps I can help in some way,” said Val. “Perhaps your mistake is not irreparable, after all.”
“You can’t,” she said unhappily. “So let’s not think about it. I’m very tired of my mistake and I’d much rather you’d tell me about all the gay, cheerful things that are going on in Cannes tonight.”
They glanced shoreward at the line of mysterious and alluring lights, the big toy banks with candles inside that were really the great fashionable hotels, the lighted clock in the old town, the blurred glow of the Café de Paris, the pricked-out points of villa windows rising on slow hills toward the dark sky.
“What is everyone doing there?” she whispered. “It looks as though something gorgeous was going on, but what it is I can’t quite tell.”
“Everyone there is making love,” said Val quietly.
“Is that it?” She looked for a long time, with a strange expression in her eyes. “Then I want to go home to America,” she said. “There is too much love here. I want to go home tomorrow.”
“You are afraid of being in love then?”
She shook her head.
“It isn’t that. It’s just because—there is no love here for me.”
“Or for me either,” added Val quietly. “It is sad that we two should be at such a lovely place on such a lovely night and have—nothing.”
He was leaning toward her intently, with a sort of inspired and chaste romance in his eyes—and she drew back.
“Tell me more about yourself,” she inquired quickly. “If you are Russian where did you learn to speak such excellent English?”
“My mother was American,” he admitted. “My grandfather was American also, so she had no choice in the matter.”
“Then you’re American too!”
“I am Russian,” said Val with dignity.
She looked at him closely, smiled and decided not to argue. “Well then,” she said diplomatically, “I suppose you must have a Russian name.”
But he had no intention now of telling her his name. A name, even the Rostoff name, would be a desecration of the night. They were their own low voices, their two white faces—and that was enough. He was sure, without any reason for being sure but with a sort of instinct that sang triumphantly through his mind, that in a little while, a minute or an hour, he was going to undergo an initiation into the life of romance. His name had no reality beside what was stirring in his heart.
“You are beautiful,” he said suddenly.
“How do you know?”
“Because for women moonlight is the hardest light of all.”
“Am I nice in the moonlight?”
“You 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
