“Your cigarette’s out.”
Ginger started violently. Her voice, coming suddenly out of the silence, had struck him like a blow.
“Oh, thanks!”
He forced himself to light another match. It sputtered noisily in the stillness. He blew it out, and the uncanny quiet fell again.
Ginger drew at his cigarette mechanically. For an instant he had seen Sally’s face, white-cheeked and bright-eyed, the chin tilted like a flag flying over a stricken field. His mood changed. All his emotions had crystallized into a dull, futile rage, a helpless fury directed at a man a thousand miles away.
Sally spoke again. Her voice sounded small and far off, an odd flatness in it.
“Married?”
Ginger threw his cigarette out of the window. He was shocked to find that he was smoking. Nothing could have been farther from his intention than to smoke. He nodded.
“Whom has he married?”
Ginger coughed. Something was sticking in his throat, and speech was difficult.
“A girl called Doland.”
“Oh, Elsa Doland?”
“Yes.”
“Elsa Doland.” Sally drummed with her fingers on the arm of the chair. “Oh, Elsa Doland?”
There was silence again. The little clock ticked fussily on the mantelpiece. Out in the street automobile horns were blowing. From somewhere in the distance came faintly the rumble of an elevated train. Familiar sounds, but they came to Sally now with a curious, unreal sense of novelty. She felt as though she had been projected into another world where everything was new and strange and horrible—everything except Ginger. About him, in the mere sight of him, there was something known and heartening.
Suddenly, she became aware that she was feeling that Ginger was behaving extremely well. She seemed to have been taken out of herself and to be regarding the scene from outside, regarding it coolly and critically; and it was plain to her that Ginger, in this upheaval of all things, was bearing himself perfectly. He had attempted no banal words of sympathy. He had said nothing and he was not looking at her. And Sally felt that sympathy just now would be torture, and that she could not have borne to be looked at.
Ginger was wonderful. In that curious, detached spirit that had come upon her, she examined him impartially, and gratitude welled up from the very depths of her. There he sat, saying nothing and doing nothing, as if he knew that all she needed, the only thing that could keep her sane in this world of nightmare, was the sight of that dear, flaming head of his that made her feel that the world had not slipped away from her altogether.
Ginger did not move. The room had grown almost dark now. A spear of light from a street lamp shone in through the window.
Sally got up abruptly. Slowly, gradually, inch by inch, the great suffocating cloud which had been crushing her had lifted. She felt alive again. Her black hour had gone, and she was back in the world of living things once more. She was afire with a fierce, tearing pain that tormented her almost beyond endurance, but dimly she sensed the fact that she had passed through something that was worse than pain, and, with Ginger’s stolid presence to aid her, had passed triumphantly.
“Go and have dinner, Ginger,” she said. “You must be starving.”
Ginger came to life like a courtier in the palace of the Sleeping Beauty. He shook himself, and rose stiffly from his chair.
“Oh, no,” he said. “Not a bit, really.”
Sally switched on the light and set him blinking. She could bear to be looked at now.
“Go and dine,” she said. “Dine lavishly and luxuriously. You’ve certainly earned …” Her voice faltered for a moment. She held out her hand. “Ginger,” she said shakily, “I … Ginger, you’re a pal.”
When he had gone, Sally sat down and began to cry. Then she dried her eyes in a businesslike manner.
“There, Miss Nicholas!” she said. “You couldn’t have done that an hour ago … We will now boil you an egg for your dinner and see how that suits you!”
XI
Sally Runs Away
If Ginger Kemp had been asked to enumerate his good qualities, it is not probable that he would have drawn up a very lengthy list. He might have started by claiming for himself the virtue of meaning well, but after that he would have had to chew the pencil in prolonged meditation. And, even if he could eventually have added one or two further items to the catalogue, tact and delicacy of feeling would not have been among them.
Yet, by staying away from Sally during the next few days he showed considerable delicacy. It was not easy to stay away from her, but he forced himself to do so. He argued from his own tastes, and was strongly of opinion that in times of travail, solitude was what the sufferer most desired. In his time he, too, had had what he would have described as nasty jars, and on these occasions all he had asked was to be allowed to sit and think things over and fight his battle out by himself.
By Saturday, however, he had come to the conclusion that some form of action might now be taken. Saturday was rather a good day for picking up the threads again. He had not to go to the office, and, what was still more to the point, he had just drawn his week’s salary. Mrs. Meecher had deftly taken a certain amount of this off him, but enough remained to enable him to attempt consolation on a fairly princely scale. There presented itself to him as a judicious move the idea of hiring a car and taking Sally out to dinner at one of the roadhouses he had heard about up the Boston Post Road. He examined the scheme. The more he looked at it, the better it seemed.
He was helped to this decision by the extraordinary perfection of the weather. The weather of late had been a revelation to Ginger. It was his first experience of America’s
