Argosy, Vol. 85, No. 3 — page 124: what you’re looking at

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

466 could tell them a better way to govern themselves than they had. ° Followed toasts and more toasts. Then they grew less formal and got to telling us delicious yarns of their raids—yarns that would have made a fortune for a story- writer. They may have been all true or part true, or mostly pure fiction — but they were all good. Then they grew still less formal. Some- body got the piano going, and they all sang. Somebody else started a phono- graph and—well, it was “ good night” then. The partizans of the machine- made music didn’t even bother to line up opposite those who held to the piano. Each chose his song and did his best with it, until it happened to go softer than the other, when he would shift to the one he could hear better. And Louie and I made our getaway as gracefully as our legs would let us. Meanwhile they decided that the Louisa II’s cold storage plant was the place to keep the best of the food to be left for the shore guard. The next morn- ing it was crammed beyond possibility of shutting its doors. We were bidden to help ourselves. After the raider’s depar- ture our deck became the mess-room for the officers of the station. Another three days brought the lucky raider home again with another load of provisions. ‘There was another night of high yet decent revel. Without raising any idea that all Germany’s war-prisoners were treated alike, I was becoming quite convinced that, so far as we were con- cerned, enduring prison life was going to be mostly a question to be solved by the capacity of our stomachs to stand up under the strain of some two and a half banquets a day. Joy-prison—it was that with the joy raised to the mth power and the prison part lowered to the irreducible minimum. It was that for just one week—and then it wasn’t that at all. For that week I think I was the one to catch the mth power, and that multiplied by several times what the rest were get- THE ARGOSY. ting out of it. For I wasn’t enjoying just food and drink and good stories and songs and boisterous stag dances. I was enjoy- ing the society of the girl! | Because Corporal Rudy could get along pretty well in English; because, maybe, he was the lieutenant’s cousin and in line for a little favoritism; but still more, as I figured it out, because his presence pro- vided chaperonage to afford his sister a little change from a scene that must be driving her to the verge of dementia, to the comforts and the society of the brighter world aboard our yacht — Cor- poral Rudy was put at the head of the half dozen marines assigned to keep our prison tied to the dock. And he and the girl spent practically the whole of each day aboard with us.. And I had the girl to myself. She re- fused to warm up to the man who had blackened her country’s navy before the officers of the navy of another country. And, since Rudy and Louie seemed to hit it off together beautifully, it required lit- tle engineering to keep the four of us paired off exactly to my liking and almost to the satisfaction of my heart’s desire. Heart’s desire!—well, there wasn’t any doubt in my mind about my heart’s de- sire before the second day’s sun had set. I forgave her East Side English—forgot it. Not until the end of the week did I discover the flattering fact that she was using my own Style of conversation as a model wherewith to reform her own, and had already begun, in her more careful moments, to improve on several charac- teristics of the model. She was a wonder, that little girl. None, I reflected, but a wonder in cleverness and versatility could have so thoroughly Americanized herself in the brief time Rudy’s English indicated for their Amer- ican residence. None, I was quite sure, but a wonder could have got me in the depths of love to which I had fallen in all but no time. I had every two-year-old college-alum- nus’s conviction that I was no susceptible boy. ~ comicloool C©