City and town life -- Fiction; United States -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
The boy did not speak to his partner during the next dance but went
about debating something in his mind; and when the number was ended he
tripped over to the leader of the orchestra, whom he had hired for
dances a score of times, and asked for "Love's Golden Dream Is Past" as
the next "extra." It was his waltz and he didn't care if the whole town
knew it--they would dance it together. And so when the orchestra began
he started away, a very heart-broken, brown-eyed, olive-skinned little
Welshman, who barely touched the finger-tips of a radiant, overdeveloped
blonde with roses in her cheeks and moonlight in her hair. She would
have come closer to him but he danced away and only hunted for her soul
with his brown Celtic eyes. And because David had asked for it and they
loved the boy, the old men in the orchestra played the waltz over and
over again, and at the end the dancers clapped their hands for an
encore, and when the chorus began they sang it dancing, and the boy
found the voice which cheered the "Men of Harlech," the sweet, cadent
voice of his race, and let out his heart in the words.
When he led her to a seat, the blonde had tears on her eyelashes as she
choked a "good-by, Dave" to him, but he turned away without answering
her and went to find his next partner. It was growing late and the crowd
soon went down the long, dark stairway leading from Imperial Hall, into
the moonlight and down the street, singing and humming and whistling
"Love's Golden Dream," and the next day they and the town and the band
came down to the noon train to see the conquering hero go.
It was lonesome in the office after David went, and his music-box in the
corner was dumb, for we couldn't find the brass lever for it, though the
printers and the reporters hunted in his trunk and in every place they
could think of. But the lonesomest things in the world for him were the
machines. The big press grew sulky and kept breaking the web, and his
linotype took to absorbing castor-oil as if it were a kind of hasheesh.
The new operator could run the new machine, but David's seemed to resent
familiarity. It was six months before we got things going straight after
he left us.
He wrote us soldier letters from the Presidio, and from mid-ocean, and
from the picket-line in front of Manila. One afternoon the messenger-boy
came in snuffling with a sheet of the Press-report. David's name was
among the killed. Then we turned the column rules on the first page and
got out the paper early to give the town the news. Henry Larmy brought
in an obituary, the next day, which needed much editing, and we printed
it under the head "A Tribute from a Friend," and signed Larmy's name to
it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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