THE CHINA MAIL FRIDAY SUPPLEMENT, JANUARY 17, 1941.
SHORT STORY
Love's Sweet Song By Mark Hellinger
SHE had a mouthful of hairpins none of the things her eyes
Geeted, Her mind was on Bob.
and her hands male exquisite doll-like motions on top of ber head. Meanwhile, she kept real- ing and re-reading the little tee gram that stood against the var ity mirror.
re
But they didn't care. They talk- I just wanted to make sure that
He looked at his watch,
“Oh, no,” he said. “You've put
this time. Long time no see, my darling. So now We go some- where."
ed in circles, asking ench other you weren't hungry. That's all." me off before, Marion, But not about whozis and whatzis, And She looked around An old mar between their questions and an- kat next
to her. He needed
aswers there was very little of 21 shave and his whiskers were com- sensible relationship. ing out very grey. He slept. Hus
"how
pince-nez had fallen to his vest, "Listen," he suggested, "I love you. Stop Arrive three- but his hands still held the paper about grabbing something to eat forty-two. Union Stabon. Stop firmly. Another old man sat far- while we talk?" He stretched his I love yo Stop. Be there T ther down, meticulously cleaning arms. "How would you like a tine or I'll
break your
lovely his finger-nails with a small fle steak this big? I used to know neck Stop I love you Bob' and wiping the cleanings on his the finest place you-
coat sleeve,
this VOICE trailed
When she was ready she folded the telegram carefully and put it in her purse. Then she gave her. self a fun critical glance, and stepped out of the apartinent
It was exactly three o'clock, and the station was only five blocks away. So she walked it. Her pretty lule brain was full of the romance of this situation, For
breathes there a woman with soul so dead who never to herself has subd:
"Gee, 2710!**
he sure is Buts about
She and Bob had been in love for a long time. Bob was a ire- mendous chap, with wwww har and very blue eyes. He was im petuous. He wanted to do great things.
He wanted to make mil- lions and he was willing to de- vote at least ninety days to the job
He wanted to mary hơi Now This mstant. He wanted to stand in the centre of Times Square and kiss her. He was that crazy guy.
*
Marion
he
"Say," he cried, as though just made a sensational discovery "I've been standing here four mini- utes-and I've only kissed you once!"
She tried to push him away. but he kissed her several times.
He tried to take her arm.
"No, please," she said seriously. "I'm sorry, but I can't, I'd like to, But I really can't.”
He frowned.
"Give me one good reason," he demanded.
She shrugged.
"Let's And a quiet spot.” ho said seriously. "Some out-of-the- way place where we can sit for hours and talk. I've got so much to tell you. And beside, I want to look at you alone." He waved airily at the station. "Without all these yaps sharing the look,"
"Me?" he said. "Why, darling. She shook her head. "Let's sit home and, cook my husband's din- I'm not even dreaming of eating. here," she suggested.
Across the way a woman with Douted a red hand was trying to get a lit- tle boy lo spit out
"I'm disappointed in you,” she a penny he had in his mouth.
"How can you thinkc 01 He kept shak- said. ng his head. A young fellow food at a tune like this?" with a
nice profile was penelling time-table. After a moment he He stepped back. walked out Towards the street.
these things
Marion
Saw all
rather vaguely. and then went back to her magazine. She was dipping through the pages once again--pages that couldn't hold her interest--when she suddenly felt what is known as a presence. her She looked up, and out of came a little, high-pitched squeal.
She jumped to her feet, and the ng oaf in front of her picked her and whirled her in a circle.
"Darling!" he cried. "Oh, Mar- ion, my darling!"
The
old man who had been sleeping came to suddenly and dropped his paper. The big chap pressed Marion to him. Then he sel her down carefully, as you would a thin china teacup,
"You look wonderful," he clamed.
"Beautiful!"
But Marion wasn't that daffy Two years before, when he had an offer to work in an Oklahoma oil- field she had told him to go
"Just a minute,” Marion shout- Go, Bob. Concentrate on work ed. "I's my turn to look at you." Try it for two years. And He stepped back stiffly, chin up after that, if you still want me. She placed her fingers beside her I'll marry you
Because, dar- cheek and studied him in mork ling. I love you.
seriousness. Then she grinned.
"You'll do," she laughed.
He scowled heavily.
Bob didn't like it. He wanted to marry fest, and then go to the oil wells. But Marion won. And she had stood in this very station two years ago, sobbing bitterly as "I'd better," he returned, in a his train pulled out. She was sure deep voice. he'd forget her; sure that he'd for you for a long time, and I'm "I've been waiting never come back. But she was a very dangerous man to put off." wrong. Dead, wrong.
Bob not He leaned down and kissed her only remembered, but his love briefly, "As a matter of fact, flourished with absence. It grew feel a rampage coming on
until time staggered and he de- spaired of living through the two long years.
And now he was coming home. This crazy, wonderful kid who had never stopped loving her for an instant,
Marion sat down in the waiting- room and opened a magazine. Her
now
I
right
"Grrrrr!" He bared his teeth. "Look out for me, young lady. Gerrrr! l'in the wildest man you ever knew!"
The only people who did stop Jo watch them were the people who were rushing for trains. One skinny woman looked at them for a moment and then turned up her nose. "Huh," she said. "Ex- sawy hibitionists!"
eyes skimmed over the pages and the advertisements and the story illustrations. But her mind
,1
This Misery
Bombing brings 445
to
い
"I'd really like to. Jue," Khe said honestly, "but it just can't be done. I'm waiting here to meet an old boy friend named Bob and then I have to hurry right
her."
Of Dust
back jmany primulive things, of which dust is not the least, a mmor hor- ror of war, but none the less dis- Rushing It is, in normal times. surprising that there should be so much dust in the world; a room is cleaned, the windows are shut, not breath stirring, and yet, in a few hours, the shelf that was dust- less is dusty again. Housework is a series of repetitions. What- This form of disaster is especial. ever is done has soon to be done y objectionable to the British be- again, but at least in the case of cause we are more accustomed to cups and plates we know who and the curse of wetness and of slime what have made them dirty. But than to the plague of drought and in the case of the dusty bookshelf dust. the dirt is simply a mystery, and mist and mud, perhaps this nui- If we were not so used to
all the laws of nature. a mystery which magically defles
Dust ar- rives without a cause; gaze at a shaft of sunlight and you see that it has discovered, with its endless flutterings, the secret of perpetual motion. Dust adores a vacuum, and cleaner it is certainly not exter- though harassed by # vacuum
cutor of unnecessary matter. minated by that assiduous perse-
send out for the effects and equip- agriculture was revealed by some ment of an African explorer or person of genius who saw that Mesopotamian guzie. It is fash- what Nature did with the wild jonable now to talk
bombed corn man might also copy with areas being "plastered"; sitting the tame. So the vagrant, food-
ceilings, among collapsed
with gathering life of the desert nomad their raw material lying about ip was exchanged for the static. tumbled plenty, one appreciates to food-growing life of the
new- the full the meaning of that word. made farmer and citizen. Egypt, where civilisation arose und whence it began to flow, came to its birth among the sand whose amazingly dry air has preserved so many of its marvels for us to excavate and admire unspoiled. But the dry sand only preserved did not, in fact, arise from the de- what the wet mud made. Egypt
sert, where Its Sphinx and Pyra- nids are laid; it was the child of the river. Nefertiti, exquisite re- lic and symbol of that young civility's quick grace, sprang far more surely from the Nile than did Venus from the sea. one thinks of that amazing dawn When of the human spirit it is strange dust to reflect that its name, as they
say, is Mud.
By Ivor Brown
sance would be less of an irrita- tion to the throat as well as to the temper. To put up with storms with equanimity one has to be a Dry Bob from birth; but we are not Bedouins and do not regard a patch of trees and·
а
If such be the quantity, and
The floor and the slime which pertinacity of dust. in. ordinary spring of water as a rare gift of
it left for the receipt of seed were the gods, precious beyond, rubies. circumstances, it is only to be ex- and to be treasured as the scanty not a plague, but a yearly bless- pected that abnormal percussions scource of life itself. If we were word created to describe a lonely ing Moreover, we still use the and explosions will provide a it would not seem so strange or dust-storm of immeasurable size
well with trees around it as the and unquenchable ferocity. All
abiding symbol of beatitude and premises adjacent to a bomb-fall
consolation. Egypt, through its re- are immediately submerged in a
curring gift of water, became an Sahara of powdery gril. I am
oasis in the barren world, just nyself now writing with all my books and properties currying an
be an ancestral instinct in man's as the occasional spring was an oasis in the desert. So there may inch or two of this odious deposit, and were I to consult an oracle or
constant use of dust as the symbol seek a quotation I might as well
of the great enemy, of death, of decay, and of the ruin of all rich- ness and all beauty.
AMONG THE CLOUDS-T he excitement of air-combat lạch, ot the only thrill.experienced by our fighter pilots. There is a new world of astonishing beauty; among the clouds. Hurricane formations above the lower cloud layers patrol. In-an-serial wonderlandu. These fightkerescannfis at a height otmore than six«miles.... (Copyright. Fox).
so unpleasant to recover one's propedy from beneath the sands of the desert. But chance hus made us Wet Bobs whose notion of life, at least in winter, is ex- pressed in terms of Wellington boots, and foot-scrap
mudguards,
ers at the front door.
The conquest of dust in this country appeared to be completed by the metalled roads of the mo Storist: During the early years of
the
Fautomobilism the driver prepared: Man has fought his watery way ato; be “plastered" by equipping out of the torrid waste of sands himself with a poaked cap, and which surrounded and obstructed *~pecial spectacles, while his ladies his first efforts to grow up. To- dld actually veil themselves as day in the warring. Middle East, though for an Arabian excursion dust is more than ever the fos and and a ride on camelback across water more than ever the goal and the burning sands. The unfortun- the companion. "Dust and ashes, Eater cyclists and pedestrians who dead and done for," cried
were passed by the. Panhard or bard of old, and dust: (with or Daimler of those days were en- without ashes) is more likely in gulted in a tornado of powdered the end to destroy an army than clements of road surface, and that mud which has been the ter- what they suffered then one occa- for of the fighter in Europe. We Isionally rediscovers in some-for- in the North think of water as the eign country, now-or-after bomb element which chiefly prevents in- vasions and checks the would-be conqueror: But: the.. grenter scourge of the adventurous has. When we are struggling through often been the dry land, not the mud-we think of it as the foulest: wet. As many have been checked of our pests, but at least the stuff by earth's - lack of water as by is limited to one level. It does water's lack of land. The primol not gather in clouds, fly up, then curse of mah was supposed to be settle again. It does not clog the a Deluge, but was much more` breathing tubes as well as trap the probably dust. And to dust, in feet; it may splash' into the eye, more senses than one, does this but it does not continually invadó modern bombing lead us back. It. Ask the inhabitants of our fewe
onge
dualy areas-say, for example, tha
const of the Fylde on a windy day. It is all the more odd thon that whether they would rather live. dust should also haver become a among ditches on dunes, moorland symbol of inconstancy, “Churag- Hinosa ob; the»dny«wastes of the, ters, writ; in: dust't" and; “latters donatland,; and: they would probh-traced on sand are frequently Jably vote for the damp alternative, made the types of the fleeting faith and of the idle, unregarded word. Yet, us, the bombed-out soon dis- We use the word: "mud" os. a cover, there is nothing more en- [term of abuse, but out of mud during and hard to shake off than came civilisation. It was in the a good heavy shower of this same Good land of the Nile, where bar- article. That is what every wo- re-sandla periodically turned to massor at least every housemaid, fertile earth, - that the secret of has always known.