The Darts of Cupid: Stories Read Free Page B

passage, walking in the direction of the General’s office. I repeated my excursion once before and once after the morning coffee break. On that last occasion, I met the Major once again in the passage, this time coming up behind me. "Miss P.," he said. I stopped and turned around.
    "How is it," he asked, "that every time I happen to pass by I meet you outside the office?"
    "If you didn’t run around so much yourself, you wouldn’t meet me so much, Major," I said.
    "May I inquire where you’ve been?" he said. "Was it a case of the lady glowworm who told her boyfriend glowworm, ‘If you’ve got to glow, you’ve got to glow’?"
    "Vous tombez mal,” I said. "I went to get a drink of water."
    "Oh, we speak French when we are on our dignity, do we?" he said. "But tell me, how did you manage to drink? Are there any glasses in the ladies’ room?"
    "Oh, yes," I said, "there are some tumblers."
    "And you drank it out of a tumbler?" he asked.
    "I did," I said.
    "That’s bad," he said, with a pretense of being grieved. "I thought you’d be quicker on the uptake, after what I told you the other day." He paused. "Next time you’re thirsty, Miss P., drink with a spoon. One spoonful at a time. Go back, return—another spoonful. That should work out at fifteen journeys." And I walked away, followed by the sound of laughter.
    That day, in the late afternoon, the Major came in carrying a sheaf of papers. He stopped in the door and informed us that it had been decided to spread the free days and to carry on with the work on Sundays. "Now, ladies, which of you would like to work on Sunday?"
    The idea appealed to me greatly; it was nice to be free during the week, when the shops were open. "I’ll work," I said.
    "You mean, you’ll be here, Miss P.?" said the Major.
    In the week that followed, I worked steadily, irrespective of the Major’s presence or absence, and I was quieter, too, during the tea and coffee breaks, and somewhat morose during the lunchtime gatherings, which made Claudia remark, "You are losing your sparkle, Prescott-Clark. You aren’t going to run round as a reformed character, are you?" And June said, "How now, brown cow? Let’s have a real orgy today, shall we? He won’t be in all day. He’s gone to London, I hear." And I said, "But he’ll pick on me when he gets back, and I refuse to be his court jester and office clown, you know." When she said, "Shame on you, Prescott-Clark, to let yourself be got down by our beloved Major," I hinted that my dejection was due to a certain Captain’s having been posted abroad.
    Beryl liked to declare that she was "sick and tired of men" and couldn’t be "bothered anymore with that rot," but I, on the contrary, felt willing to be bothered, and even if I admitted to the rot, I found it worthy of indulging in, because it was never quite the same kind of rot. Since entering the War Office, I had had two affairs with American officers, each lasting for several weeks. I finished the one by provoking a quarrel and withdrawing in a pretense of huffiness. In the second case, there had been no need for such subterfuge, because the officer had been posted away. In each case, I had been bored. And in each case I might have been willing to carry on for longer if it had not been for the attitude common to both men; they were both married, and they gave me to understand that they were fundamentally faithful. It boiled down to the joke of the wife in America writing to her husband-soldier overseas, "I hear you got yourself a mistress. What has she got that I haven’t got?" and his replying, "Nothing, except she’s got it right here." I could not stand this. I did not want to be second best. I wanted to be the one and only one, even if it was for a short span of time. Amazed and disgusted at the blockheadedness of the men who failed to perceive this, I was able to agree with renewed sincerity with Beryl’s utterances concerning the selfishness, the insensitivity, and the lack of