Adventure, February 1917 — page 85: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

+ Nobody’s Island a slim hand that was colder than it need have been, seemed to do some good. “T like your hand,” said Edith sudden- ly. “It’s such a kind sort of hand. I liked it before I liked your face. Women are _ funny things. Ben, Pm nearly hysterical. tonight; but don’t let me, it’s so dreadfully Early Victorian,’ and ve always hated the idea.” “All right. You aren’t going to be hys- teric, and if you were there’s a water-bucket outside, and if there wasn’t, why, I should think anyhow you’d earned the right to some little luxury of the kicking and crying kind about as well as any woman on earth ever did.” “One — doesn’t — let oneself go,” said Edith, speaking her creed of race and class with an effort that almost contradicted the words. how I can’t. I’ve been chased and worried too much. Ben, what is it—what is 7t— that is chasing and worrying you and me? It makes one think that the Furies and Fates in the Greek plays weren’t so imagin- ary after all. Things kept happening, just ‘like— What are we going to do?” “In the first place,” said Slade, closing both of his hard, dependable hands About Edith’s clinging fingers, ‘‘we’re not going to lose heart about anything at all. This cow who says he’s your cousin by marriage is evidently the estimable person—who has been advertising. Well, he may suspect what he likes, but he can’t prove anything. Mere resemblance goes for nothing.” Edith did not seem to be listening: “T wonder if it—hurts?” she said slowly, staring at the smoky hurricane lamp slung from the ridge-pole. 3? Slade, as always, understood. He knew : what grisly vision floated there between those blue eyes and the flame. He answer- ed her thought. “No. But put that out of your mind, now, and for always, my girl. That’s, never— Do you think I would stop at anything that——” “T know you wouldn’t,” she answered low and hurriedly, taking the full significance of the thought so thinly clothed in words. “But Ben—how do you think I could stand being set free from something I never did, at the cost of your really doing— Oh, we must be mad to sit here talking like this!” “It’s partly the country,’ said Slade, handing her a cigaret. Take a light “But we’ve got to think, and some- from mine, it’ll do you good. You see, one feels differently about things in New Guinea. I suppose because things are dif- ferent. But feelings or no feelings, the thing you’re afraid of is never going to be. Get that into your frizzy head. About this cow of an English—I beg your pardon, I for- got you're only a ’vert to Australianism yourself—well, about this estimable naval officer, then. Just take him as if you’d never heard of him before and thought him a little mad, but meant to be polite all the same. “He can’t stay on Scratchley forever. He'll have to go down to Samarai if he wants to really do anything. When he goes to Samarai, I’ll go too, and he won’t get there first because either he’ll go in the Black Snake with me, or whatever he goes in will be overtaken and waltzed rings round by the Black Snake on the way. And when he gets there, either he’ll go right away—which would be all right, though not likely —or he won’t. If he doesn’t, he’ll wireless by the first ship to somebody or other.” “Well?” said Edith; the end seemed un- satisfactory to her. Slade laughed a little. “T haven’t told you all my secrets yet,” he said. Then he put his mouth to her ear and whispered three words. led. “Why, that’s good!” she said: then, if he——” “Oh, in that case, dear love, the world is wide, and there’s a shot or two in the locker yet. Life’s an adventure, isn’t it?” “It’s a—it’s a much too——”’ “But Edith’s eye spark- - 7 “There is one of the many disadvantages © of being a woman. What you really want to say is, ‘It’s.a —— sight too much of an adventure sometimes.’ Instead of which you have to pay a coarse man to say it for you.” “Pay? Oh, I’m not quite scanid: There’s your pay. Yes, I did feel like that. You have made me steadier somehow, Ben. I feel as if I might sleep if I tried. Thank Heaven, I haven’t to lie awake with my boots on listening for cannibals and wild | boars tonight.” > “No, Joan of Arc. You needn’t.” - He turned out the lamp, talking pleasant- ly as he did so. But Edith, in the little toilet-glass she had set up above her bed, Ss Comicboo (EO)