Chapter X: Part 10

So we came to that last evening on board, of which I must now tell you. It had taken me the intervening time to get used to the new outlook. The habit of seeing myself surrounded by a whole stockade of prohibitions was too strong to overcome in a flash. I had to let my mind emerge into freedom gently, telling myself each day that with a wife like this I could serve the cause more devotedly than ever, since she would be serving it too.

Of that dedication to a cause I was possibly too much aware. My uniform made me aware of it. My game leg and my sightless eye made me aware of it. The need of whole peoples, like the French and British and Italian, of every man who could fire a gun or ram home a bayonet or speak a rousing word—that more than anything else seemed to put a consecration upon me of which I was as foolishly and yet as loftily conscious as a modern king, accustomed to a bowler hat, when he rides through the streets with his crown on.

And on the last evening there was enough of the ecstatic in the air to justify this sense of a mission.

The voyage, which had not been without the exciting stimulus of danger, was successfully over. The west was actually reached, and the things done left behind us. The things to be done were making our pulses beat faster and our energies yearn forward. To-morrow with its summons to activity was more keenly in our consciousness than to-day. Doctors, nurses, returning soldiers, the sparse handful of business men—we were already in heart ashore, walking in streets, riding in tram-cars, eating in dining-rooms, sleeping in beds, taking part in hard work, and deeming these things a privilege. Voices and laughter in the clear, still night, and the clicking of heels on the deck, were part of the relief and joyousness.

Late in the afternoon we had picked up the Nantucket light-ship, which rested like a star on the water. Now the horizon was being strung with beads of light, one, two, three, or little clusters at a time, behind which we knew that advancing night was lighting myriads of lamps all the way to the Pacific. On the Atlantic coast it was already dark, with cities and towns ablaze, and villages and farm-houses lit by kindly, shimmering windows. In the Middle West it was twilight, with electrics spangling the office-buildings here and there, and pale-gold flowers strewn over the prairie floors. Beyond the Mississippi it would still be day, but day dissolving gorgeously, softly, into sunset and moonrise and the everlasting magic of the stars.

As she and I hung over the deck rail side by side we felt ourselves on the edge of wonders. The Old World was in need of us, and we were in need of the New. To us who were New World born, and who were coming back to generous, easy-going welcome after the unspeakable things we had seen, the craving for New World brotherhood and vigor was like that of hunger or thirst. This much we admitted in so many words—even she.

She was still elusive; she was still mysterious. Though during the past few days she had not resisted a certain habit as to the place and hour at which we should find ourselves together and had been willing to talk freely on any theme connected with the cause, she took flight from a hint of the personal, like a bird at an approaching footstep.

Nevertheless, she was so far responsive as to say in answer to some question of mine, “My immediate plans—”

I broke in abruptly, “Let me tell you about your immediate plans.”

As the deck was faintly illuminated, since we were again sailing with lights, I saw that change in her eyes which comes when a fire on a hearth bursts into a conflagration.

Probably my tone and the change in my manner had startled her.

“You? What?” she began, confusedly.

“I’ll tell you what your plans are; but before that let me tell you something else.”

She put up her hand. “Wait! Don’t—”

But it was too late to stop me. I couldn’t have stopped myself. I was carried on by the impetus that came from my having been so many years held back. I was no longer the consecrated servant of a cause. As for having been a drunkard and a thief, no shadow of remembrance stayed with me. I was simply a man head over heels in love with a woman, and in all sorts of stupid, stumbling phrases saying so.

She listened because she couldn’t do anything else without walking away; but she listened with a kind of aloofness. With her clasped hands resting on the rail and her little, black silhouette held quietly erect, she gazed off toward a great white star, which I suppose must have been Capella, and heard my tale because she couldn’t stop it.

“Listen,” I went on, leaning on an arm extended along the rail. “I’ll tell you your story. I’ve pieced it together and I know what it is. I didn’t know it when I came on board. It puzzled me.”

Her lips moved, but there was no turn of her head or stir of her person.

“Please don’t. I’m—I’m not sure that I could bear it.”

“Why shouldn’t I? You’ve done certain things. Let me give you their interpretation.”

“If I do—” she began, weakly.

I couldn’t allow her to continue.

“I see now the explanation of so many things that bewildered me at first—that made me suffer. That day at Rosyth, for instance, when you went in and left me, you didn’t despise or hate me. You may have been disillusioned—”

“It isn’t the word,” she murmured, still motionless, and looking off at the big white star. “I’d been thinking of you as the kind of man I’d—I’d been looking for so long.”

“And you saw I was less so than any of the others.”

“I’m not saying that. But if you think it was easy to tear up all one’s conceptions by the roots and plant in new ones—however kindly—all at once—”

“Oh no, I don’t! not now. But at that time I didn’t know you. It’s only been since coming on board and finding out what you’ve done—”

Curiosity prompted her to glance round at me.

“Then it was only since coming on board?”

“Oh, it was simple enough. It’s silly to keep up the secret. I was talking, while we were still in the dock at Liverpool, with that handsome Canadian nurse.”

“Miss Ogden. She was matron of the hospital at—”

“She knew who you were. She couldn’t tell me your name, but she said—or Miss Prynne said—that you’d come over with Evelyn—that you’d been at Taplow with Mabel—”

“I know; the sort of thing that goes round among nurses.”

“And so I put two and two together and formed a theory.”

“You needn’t tell me what it is. Please don’t.”

“But I want to.” I hurried on before she could protest further. “When you saw that you’d—you’d hurt me—that day at Rosyth—and that I had disappeared—and gone into the army—and away to England—you got into touch with Evelyn—”

“I wanted to do something,” she declared, in a tone of self-defense. “I couldn’t help it when I knew the need was going to be so great. We didn’t see that all at once, because we thought the war was going to be over in a very little while. But when we began to realize it wasn’t—”

“Oh, I don’t say you did it all on my account.”

Though this was meant to provoke either admission or denial, she glided over it.

“It wasn’t easy to do anything in New York, because we hadn’t got that far as yet; and so I naturally went to Canada. When I did so Annette gave me a line of introduction to Evelyn.”

“And you told her about me.”

She fell into my trap so far as to say: “I didn’t tell her. I simply let her guess.”

“Guess what?”

“All I ever said to her in words was to ask her never to mention my name to you.”

“But why?”

“I did the same with Lady Rideover when she took me on at Taplow.”

“Why—again?”

“For the reason that—that if you ever came to find out what I was doing you’d misunderstand it; just as I see you—you do.”

“But I don’t. I don’t misunderstand it when I say that in going to my sisters you wanted to be—you mustn’t be offended!—you wanted to be near me—to watch over me as much as possible.”

“You were the only man I knew at that time who’d taken the actual step of going to the war. If there’d been any others—”

“It wouldn’t have mattered if there’d been a hundred. I don’t misunderstand it when I say that as soon as you knew I was going home by this boat you arranged—”

“To go home by it too,” she forestalled, quickly, “so that you should have somebody near you who could get about in the normal way in case there was danger. I admit that. It’s perfectly true.” She turned round on me with fire in her manner as well as in her eyes. “But what do you think I’m going home for?”

I repeated what she had said a few days before:

“You’re going home on account of your father—and to interest him and other Americans in American duty as to the war.”

“That’s a reason; it’s the reason I find it easiest to give. But I mustn’t hide it from you now that—that I’ve—I’ve another.”

I made one of my long mental leaps. I made it as a man might take the one chance of life in leaping a crevasse, knowing that there are more chances that he will be dashed to pieces in the chasm.

“You’re going home to be married.”

There was a kind of awe in the way she drew off from me.

“You’re extraordinary,” she breathed, faintly. “Miss Ogden didn’t tell you that.”

I had not cleared the crevasse. I was struggling desperately on the edge of it, while beneath me was the abyss.

“You’re going home to marry me.”

I think she gave a little bitter laugh. At any rate, there was the echo of it in her tone, as she said, with sardonic promptness: “How can I be going home to marry you, when—when I never knew till within half an hour that you—that you cared anything about me?”

I, too, must have laughed, the statement struck me as so absurd.

“What? You never knew—?”

She shook her head with an emphasis almost violent.

“You may have known,” she said, in that voice which, after all, could not be called bitter, for the reason that it was reproachful, “but I’d come to the conclusion that”—she tried to carry the situation off with a second laugh, a laugh that ended as something like a sob—“that you didn’t.”

I leaned down toward her, speaking the words right into her face.

“Didn’t care?”

She nodded silently.

“For God’s sake, what made you think that?”

“Oh—everything!”

“Everything? When? How?”

She was doing her best to convey the impression that it didn’t matter.

“Everything—always—in New York—at Atlantic City—there especially! And lately—”

“Yes? Lately?”

“Lately—at Taplow.”

“But at Taplow—how? In Heaven’s name—how?”

“Oh, I was in and out of your room.”

“So I understand; but what of that?”

“Nothing; nothing; only—only what I saw.”

“Well, what did you see?”

Instead of answering this question at once she shifted her ground.

“If you cared—as you say—why didn’t you tell some one?”

“Tell some one? Who could I tell?”

“Oh, any one. Lady Rideover, for one. She’d made a promise not to mention me; but you hadn’t.”

“But why should I have mentioned you when I never supposed she had any notion—”

“But you see that’s it. If you’d cared—so much—you’d have done it—to one of your sisters or the other. But you didn’t—not to either; and so they got the idea—”

“Yes? What idea did they get? Go on. Tell me.”

I noticed that she was twisting and untwisting her fingers, and that she had begun throwing me quick, nervous glances through the half-light.

“It’s no use telling you, because it doesn’t matter. That is, it doesn’t matter now. Everything’s—arranged.”

“We’ll talk about that later. I want to know what idea Mabel and Evelyn got.”

“They didn’t get it exactly. They were only beginning to get it when I made them understand that I was going back to be—Oh, why do you make me talk about it? Why do you bring it all up now, when it can’t do any good?”

To get at the facts I was obliged to speak with the severity one uses toward a difficult child.

“I want you to tell me what idea Mabel and Evelyn got.”

“Isn’t it perfectly evident what idea they’d get? Any one would get it when you—when you never said a word—not the least, little, confidential word—and you so ill!—and blind!—and to your own sisters!—and that Miss Farley there!”

I passed over the reference to Miss Farley because I couldn’t see what it meant. I had enough to do in seizing the new suggestion that had come to me.

“They didn’t think—they couldn’t have thought—that there was nothing on my side.”

“And everything on mine. That’s precisely the inference they drew. Girls do go about, you know, giving people to understand that men—”

“But not girls like you.”

“Yes, girls like me; or sufficiently like me. And so I had—in sheer self-respect—to let Lady Rideover see that there was nothing in it of the kind of thing she thought, and that I was actually going home to be—”

“But didn’t she see? Didn’t she know? Didn’t everybody see? Didn’t everybody know?”

In the two brief sentences that came out with something like a groan she threw tremendous emphasis on the first word.

“Nobody knew! Nobody saw!”

There was a similar emphasis on the penultimate word in my response.

“Did you ask them?”

She flashed back at me: “I did—almost. At times like that—if it’s so—some one generally knows it from—from the person who’s expecting to be brimming over with his secret.” She laughed again, lightly, nervously. “But in this instance nobody did.”

“You asked them?”

“Practically. I forgot everything I used to consider pride and—and I sounded them.”

“You sounded whom?”

“Oh, the people who knew you best—and who knew me—Annette, Esther Coningsby, Ralph—any one to whom I thought you might have betrayed yourself by a word. But it was just as with Evelyn and Lady Rideover. You had practically not mentioned my name. Hilda Grace told me she tried to sound you—that Sunday at Rosyth.”

“Well?”

“I’m only quoting her, mind you. She said she didn’t get”—there was a repetition of that nervous laugh—“she said she didn’t get—any satisfaction. And so—”

I tried to take a reasonable tone. “But how could I tell you or anybody else before I’d confessed to you who I was and where you’d first seen me?”

“Exactly. I quite understand that—now that you’ve said what you’ve said to-night. It’s where the past makes us pay—”

“For what I used to be.”

“Oh, you’re not the only one,” she declared, in a curious, offhand tone. “It’s for what I used to be, too.”

I found it difficult to follow her. “What you used to be? I don’t understand you.”

“You know about me—how I’ve been engaged to one man after another—and broken the engagements.”

“Because you were trying to find the right one.”

“It wasn’t only that. I thought of myself; I didn’t think of them. I let them offer me everything they had to give—and pretended to accept it—just to experiment—to play with—and now—now I’m—I’m caught!”

“Caught—in what way?”

She tossed her hands outward in a little, exasperated gesture.

“I can’t do the same thing again. It wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be sane.”

“The same thing? Do tell me what you mean.”

“It’s—it’s one of the same men. I’m—I’m caught. It’s what mother—and Elsie Coningsby—and other people who could talk to me plainly—told me would happen some day. I’m—I’m punished. And I can’t do the same thing the second time.”

It was still to escape from the yawning hell into which I felt myself going down that I said, stupidly, “Why can’t you?”

“Because I can’t. It’s what I said just now. It wouldn’t be sane. I’ve made a kind of history for myself. If I were to do the same thing again it wouldn’t merely seem cruel, it would seem crazy.”

“But if you don’t care for him?”

“I do—in a way. He’s been so good and kind and patient and everything! And even if I didn’t care for him at all it would be just the same—after what I’ve let him think—the second time.”

I could see her reasoning, if reasoning it was, though it was not the uppermost thought in my mind. As a matter of fact, I was repeating her statement as to “one of the same men.” Which one of them was it? There had been three—the one she didn’t trust—the one she couldn’t have lived with—and the one who was only very nice. It would make such a difference which one it proved to be that I was afraid to ask her.

I burst out, desperately: “Oh, but why did you—let him think it—the second time?”

“I don’t know. It happened by degrees—by writing—in letters—and I didn’t see how far I was going. It was a kind of reaction.”

“Reaction from what?”

She looked at me wildly. “From you, I think. As far as I remember it became definite at Taplow.”

“When you were actually seeing me every day?”

“That was the reason. It was seeing you so cheerful and full of jokes—and not missing—not missing any one—nor ever mentioning them—not to a soul. It just convinced me of what I’d been sure of before—ever since the time at Atlantic City—that you didn’t—that you never had.... And so when he suggested it in one of his letters—I don’t know what made me!—but I didn’t say it was impossible.”

“What did you say?”

“I said, who knows?—or something like that. And then he cabled—but I didn’t cable back—I only wrote—trying to say no—but not saying it decidedly enough.... And so it’s gone on—he writing and cabling both—and I only writing, but letting him think—just little by little—and not seeing how far I was being swept along.”

I wanted to be clear as to the facts.

“Then do I understand that you’re engaged to him?”

“I told him I wouldn’t be engaged again—that engagements for me had come to be grotesque. I said that if we did it we’d—we’d just go somewhere and be married.”

“If you did it? Then it’s possible—”

“No; because he’s expecting it. I’ve allowed him to expect it—just little by little, you understand—and not seeing how far I was letting myself in.... And now he’s told some people who used to know about it when I was engaged to him before—and that binds me because it will get about—so that if I were to break it off with him the second time I should be a laughing-stock—and quite rightly.”

“Oh, Regina, how could you?”

Taking no note of the fact that for the first time in my life I had called her Regina, she answered, simply: “I tell you I don’t know. If I do know it was because I was so lonely—and I’m over twenty-six—and feel older still—and nobody seemed to care about me but him—and I couldn’t bear the idea of going on and never marrying any one at all—which is what Elsie Coningsby said would happen to me—and what I’d been half wishing for myself—and yet half afraid of.... And you—”

“Yes? What about me?”

“There was a nurse at Taplow, that Miss Farley—”

“Miss Farley! Oh, good God!”

“Well, how did I know? She was very pretty.”

“Could I see whether she was pretty or not?”

“And you were always joking with her and thanking her.”

“Of course I thanked her. What else could I do?”

“You needn’t have kissed her hand. I caught you doing that one day when I was tidying up in your room.”

“Did you? Very likely. When a man is as helpless as I was his gratitude often becomes maudlin.”

“I don’t know that you need call it that. He simply falls in love with the pretty nurse who takes care of him. It was happening all the time in the hospitals. But for me—right there in your room—and shut out from everything—”

“But that wasn’t my fault. If I’d known you were there—”

“It was your fault at Atlantic City—and afterward—when I’d let you see—far more than a girl should ever let any man see.”

“But you know how impossible it was for me then—till I’d told you who I was.”

“I know it now. I didn’t know it before half an hour ago. And the time when you told me that—that thing—at Rosyth—I had no idea whether or not you meant.... And when you blame me for not coming down-stairs quicker than I did—”

“I haven’t blamed you, Regina.”

“You can’t imagine what it was to be all at sea not merely as to what you felt, but actually as to what you were—and had been. When you pulled the pearls out of your pocket—and said you were that man—”

There were two or three minutes during which she stood with face averted, and I had to give her time to regain her self-control.

“You see,” she went on, her rich mezzo just noticeably tremulous—“you see, I’d always thought about him—a girl naturally would, finding him in her room like that—but I’d thought of him as.... And I’d been thinking of you, too. I’d been thinking of you as the very opposite of him. He was so terrible—so gaunt—so stricken—I see just a little of him in you now, after all you’ve suffered.... But you—I don’t know what it was you had about you—your brother had it, too—I saw it again when I met him at Evelyn’s in Montreal, something a little more than distinguished, something faithful and good.”

“Those things are often hang-overs of inheritance that have no counterpart in the nature.”

“Well, whatever it was I saw it—and all that year those two types had been before my mind. Then when I was told that there were not two—that there was only one—it was like asking me to understand that the earth had only one pole, and that the North and the South Poles were identical.” She surprised me with the question, “Did you ever read _La Dame aux Camélias_?”

I said I had, wondering at the connection.

“Don’t you remember how it begins with the exhumation of the body of that poor woman six months after she was buried?”

I recalled the fact.

“So that all through the rest of the book, when Marguerite Gautier is at the height of her triumphs, if you call them triumphs, you see her as she was first shown to you. Well— Oh, don’t you understand? That’s the way I had to see—I had to see you!”

I hung my head. “I understand perfectly, Regina—now.”

“There’s so much we’re only beginning to understand now, both on your side and on mine.”

“When it’s almost too late—if it isn’t quite.”

Her manner, her voice, both of which had been a little piteous, took on a sudden energy.

“Oh, as to that, I’ve been thinking it over—I’ve had to think over so much—and I don’t believe the word applies.”

“Doesn’t apply?” I asked, in astonishment. “Why not—when it’s as late as it is? It’s just as if Fate had been making us a plaything.”

“I don’t believe that. Life can’t be the sport of disorganized chance. If Romeo takes poison ten minutes before Juliet wakes it’s because the years behind them led up to the mistake.”

“You mean that we reap only what we sow?”

“And that life is as much a matter of development in a logical sequence as the growth of certain plants from certain seeds. It isn’t—it can’t be—a mere frenzy of haphazards. Things happen to us in a certain way because what we’ve done leaves them no other way.”

“And was there no other way in which this could happen to you and me?”

“Think! Isn’t it the very outcome that might have been expected from what we’ve been in the past?”

I stared at her without comprehension.

“Because of your past life,” she went on, “there was something you couldn’t tell me; and because I didn’t know it I’ve taken a step which my past life doesn’t allow me to retrace. Could anything be neater?”

“And yet you’re fond of saying that the way things happen is the best way.”

“It’s the best way if it’s the only way, isn’t it? I should go mad if I thought that my life hung on nothing but caprice—whether of luck or fate or anything you call God. I can stand my deserts, however hard, if I know they’re my deserts.”

“You can stand this?”

“This is not a question of standing; it’s one of working out. Life isn’t static; it’s dynamic—those are the right words, aren’t they? It’s always unfolding. One thing leads to the next thing; and then there must be times when a lot of things that seemed separate are gathered up in one immense result. Don’t you think it must be that way?”

I said, stupidly, that I didn’t know.

“Of course you don’t know if you don’t think; but try to think!”

“What good will thinking do when we see how things are?”

“It’ll show us how to make the best of them, won’t it?”

“Is there any best to be made of your marrying anybody else than me? The way things happen isn’t necessarily the best way.”

After her hesitating syncopated sentences in dealing with what was more directly personal to her life and mine she talked now not so much calmly as surely, as of subjects she had long thought out.

“I don’t say the best way absolutely; but the best in view of what we’ve made for ourselves. For ourselves you and I have made things hard. There’s no question about that. But isn’t it for both of us now to live this minute so that the next won’t be any harder?”

There was no argument in this; there was only appeal.

“What,” I asked, “do you mean by that?”

“I suppose I mean that the best way to live this minute is to accept what it contains—till it develops into something else—as it will. This isn’t final. It’s only a step on the way to—”

“It’s a step on the way to your marrying a man you’re not in love with, and my not marrying at all.”

“And as the world is at present, aren’t there worse tragedies than that?”

Irony of which she must have been unaware pricked my dreams of celibate consecration to a cause as a pin pricks a bubble.

“So that if I stand still and let you go on—”

She threw me a quick glance. “And aren’t you going to?”

The answer to that question was what in the back of my mind I had been trying to work out.

“Wouldn’t it depend,” I said, picking the right words, “on which of the three it is? There’s one I couldn’t interfere with—not without disregarding gratitude and honor.”

“Do you want me to tell you which?”

But I didn’t—not then. Too much hung on what the knowledge would bring me. There were decisions to which I couldn’t force myself at once. In saying this I added, “But though I can’t interfere with him without disregarding gratitude and honor, I don’t say that I sha’n’t disregard them.”

In the clear starlight her eyes had a veiled metallic brightness.

“No?”

“And if I don’t,” I persisted, “what shall you do?”

“What would you expect me to do?”

“I should expect you to back me up.”

“So that we should both be disregarding gratitude and honor?”

“We’ve a right to our happiness.”

“That’s a very old argument, isn’t it?”

“It’s not the less true for being old.”

“Oh no; if it’s true it’s true—anyhow.”

“And it is true. Don’t you know it is?”

She surprised me by saying, as if quite casually, “I don’t suppose that in the end it’s the truth or the untruth of the argument that would weigh with me.”

My heart gave a thump.

“Then what would weigh with you?”

She was standing with her back to the rail, the great white star behind her. As if to emphasize the minute of suspense the engines gradually stopped, while the ship rocked gently on the tide. The lights on shore were more complex now, lights above lights, lights back of lights, with the profusion of seaboard towns even in November. The murmur of voices and the click of heels grew expectant as well as joyous.

When she spoke at last it was with breast heaving and eyes downcast. Her words came out staccatowise, as if each made its separate effort to keep itself back.

“What would weigh with me? I—I don’t know.”

“Does that mean,” I demanded, sharply, “that you might back me up?”

I could barely catch her words.

“It means first of all that—that I’m awfully weak.”

“It isn’t weak, Regina, to—to love.”

“It’s weak for a soldier to make love an excuse for not fighting.”

“But you’re not a soldier.”

“Oh yes, I am; and so are you. We’re all soldiers now—every one in the world. We keep telling ourselves—we keep telling one another—that we’re fighting for right. It’s our great justification. But what’s the use of fighting for public right if we go and do wrong privately?”

“But it isn’t right for you to throw yourself away on a man you don’t care for.”

“It’s right for me to stand by my word—what is practically my word—till something relieves me from the necessity.”

“And do you think anything ever will?”

“That’s not what I have to consider. If I do what I know I ought to do I’ve only to wait—and let the next thing come.”

“And what you know you ought to do—are you going to do it?”

She looked up at me pleadingly, quiveringly, with clasped hands.

“I don’t want to do—to do anything else. Oh, Frank, I hope you won’t make me!”

It was not this unexpected collapse that made me tremble; it was not this confession; it was the knowledge that I had her in my power. She had seemed so far above me—ever since I knew her; she had seemed so far beyond me, so strong, so aloof, so ice pure, so inflexibly and inaccessibly right! And now she was ready to come to me if I insisted on taking her.

But the hungry beast in me was not yet satisfied with her avowals.

“Could I, Regina—could I—make you?”

I once saw in the eyes of a spaniel that knew it was going to be shot the beseeching, submissive, helpless look I saw here.

“You know what I’ve been doing, Frank—the last two years—just to be where I—where I could—hear about you—occasionally—and see you perhaps—when you couldn’t see me.”

I bent down toward her, close, closer, till I almost enveloped her.

“Yes, I know that—now—and—and I’m—I’m going to make you.”

She didn’t answer, but she didn’t withdraw. Perhaps she crept nearer me. Certainly she shivered.

The look in her eyes was still helpless, submissive, beseeching; but because it grew mortally frightened as well I repeated what I had said as softly but as firmly as I could make the words:

“I’m—I’m going to make you.”

There was nothing but the strip of black veiling between her lips and mine when a sudden flash that might have come out of heaven threw me back with a start.

It was there above us—the great beacon—landlike—homelike—the New World—the new work—the new problems to be solved—the new duties toward mankind to be hammered home—while thankful voices were murmuring round us:

“Sandy Hook!”

_CHAPTER XXIV_

I never knew the compulsion exercised by organized life till I found it settling round me, with an even distribution like that of the weight of the atmosphere on the body, paralyzing my will and making it impotent. No more than I could throw off the atmosphere could I be free from this force for a second.

It began with my arrival on the dock, where Sterling Barry had come to meet his daughter. I had seen him often enough before, though I had never known him otherwise than in the way called touch-and-go. A ruddy, portly, handsome fellow of sixty-odd, with eyes that had passed on their torch to his daughter’s, he must in early life have been retiring and diffident, for his general approach now had that forced jovial note that verges on the boisterous.

“Hello! Hello!” he cried, as he lilted up to where I stood with Lovey in the Custom House Section M. “Alive and kicking, what? Couldn’t kill you. Tried, didn’t they?” he went on, looking me over. “Not but what it might have been worse, of course. Billy Townsend’s son’ll never come back at all, poor chap. Fine young fellow, with a bee in his bonnet about aviation. Would go—and now you see! Well, we’ve got you back and we’re going to keep you. What do you know about that?”

I replied that as things were I was afraid I had no choice but to stay.

“And if you want a job come to me. Some big things doing. Country never so prosperous. Lots of business for every one—even for poor old nuts like us. Well, so long! Come and see us. Mrs. Barry will want to hear you talk. Awfully keen on the war, she is, and that sort of thing. Bit down in the mouth now over this Rumania business. Sad slump that, very.”

I said that it only left the more for us to do.

“Got your hands full, what? They do seem to put it over on you, don’t they? Ah, well, we won’t see you licked. We’ll keep out of the war as war; but you’ve got our sympathy. Watchful waiting—that’s the new ticket, you know. Can do a lot with that.”

With his light, dancing step he was waltzing away again when he suddenly returned.

“Mrs. Barry’ll have something to tell you,” he said, with a gleam in his eye curiously like that in Regina’s. “Perhaps you know it already. Regina may have given you the tip, what? People get confidential on board ship. Nothing else to do. No fuss and feathers about it. They don’t want that. War-time spirit, you know. Just telling a few of our friends. Don’t mind saying that Mrs. Barry and I are mighty delighted. Been like our own son for years. Sorry when it came to nothing last time; but look at ’em now!” He pointed to Section B, where Cantyre was bending over Regina as I had bent over her last night. “Can see from here what it means. Get your congratulations by and by.”

Of all this the point is that I couldn’t say a word. I couldn’t tell him there on the dock that I didn’t mean to let it go any farther, nor did he suspect for a second that I had more than an outsider’s interest in the romance. I felt awkward and cowardly at remaining dumb, but neither time nor place admitted of a protest.

So, too, when a few minutes later Cantyre came over to give me his welcome. It was the welcome of old, with a shocked pity in it.

“Didn’t expect to see you so badly mauled,” was his sorrowful comment after the first demonstrations. “I knew you were wounded, of course, and that you had been blind. Regina wrote me that from Taplow. But I didn’t look for your being so—”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” I interposed, in the effort to shut off his sympathy.

Having asked me a few professional questions in reference to the ways in which I had been wounded, he said: “Well, now that we’ve got hold of you again we mean to feed you up and take care of you. You’re going to be my patient, Frank. For the present, at any rate, we’ll be living in the same old house, and I shall be able to keep a daily eye on you. Lovey here has your apartment as clean as an operating-room. See you there later. Just now I’ve got to go back to—to Regina. And by the way”—his habitually mournful expression brightened as a lowering day lights up when the sun bursts through the masses of drifting cloud—“by the way, I shall have something to tell you by and by. The most wonderful thing has happened, Frank—something you and I used to talk about before you went abroad.”

He wrung my hand with that way he had of pulling it downward and pulling it hard, which betrayed all sorts of raptures breaking in on a spirit that had never known common, every-day happiness. His whole face asked me to rejoice with him, and, though I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t do the other thing.

It was on my lips to say, “You can’t have her because I’m going to take her away from you.” But the words died before they were formed. The very thought died in my mind. Whatever I did, I shouldn’t be able to do it that way; and so I let him go.

“Do you know what he meant, Slim—when he said them things—the doctor?”

This was Lovey’s question as he sat beside me in the taxicab and we drove up-town.

As I made no answer, he mumbled, mysteriously: “I do. I ’aven’t valeted ’im for nothink.”

I still made no answer, and the mumble ceased.

As yet I had noticed him only as the returned traveler notices the faithful old dog that greets him by lifting his eyes adoringly and wagging his tail. I saw now that the intervening two and a half years had aged him. He had grown white and waxy; his thin gray hair was thinner. A trembling, like that of a delicately poised leaf on a day when there is little wind, shook his hands, and the left corner of his lower lip had the pathetic quiver of a child’s when it is about to sag in a great weeping.

As I had paid him so little attention on the dock, I picked up the hand resting on his knee and pressed it.

He responded with a long, harsh breath which, starting as a sigh of comfort, became something inarticulately emotional.

“Oh, Slim! I’ve got ye back, ’aven’t I?”

“Seems like it, Lovey.” I laughed without feeling mirthful.

“Ye look awful, don’t ye?”

“I suppose I do.”

“But it don’t make no difference to me, it don’t. I’d rather ’ave ye all chawed up like this than not ’ave ye at all.”

“Thank you, Lovey.”

“Them wars is awful things. Why don’t they stop ’em?” He continued, without waiting for an explanation: “It’s all along o’ them blamed Germans. The cheek o’ them—to go and fight Englishmen! There was a German in the ’at-shop in the Edgware Road used to ’ang round me somethin’ fierce; and now I believe he wasn’t nothink but a-spyin’ on me. Don’t you think he was, Slim?”

“I think very likely.”

“Makes my blood run cold, it does, the times I’ve took ’im into a little tea-shop in Great Hatfield Street—and me a-treatin’ on ’im, like. If I ’adn’t ’ad luck I might be lookin’ like you by this time. Ain’t it awful to be one-eyed, sonny?”

“Oh, I’m getting used to it.”

“Used to it till you looks in the glass, I expect. Get a fright when ye do that, don’t you? But it’s all right, Slim. It wouldn’t matter to me if you was a worse looker than y’are. I wouldn’t turn ye down, neither, not if it was for all the doctors in the world. Not but what he’s been very attentive to me while you was away. I don’t make no complaint about that. Bit finicky about socks and ’andkerchiefs always the same color—and ye couldn’t see ’is socks most o’ the time—only when he pulled up his trouser leg a-purpose—but a good spender and not pokin’ ’is nose into my affairs. I’ll say all that for ’im; but if he was to ask my ’and in marriage, like, and I could get you, Slim—all bunged up as y’are now and everything!—well, I know what I’d say.”

Too miserable to reject this bit of sympathy, I said, merely, “Unfortunately, Lovey, every one may not be of your opinion.”

“I d’n’ know about that,” he protested. “Seems to me everybody would be if you could make ’em understand, like.”

There was nothing offensive in this, coming as it did from a deep affection, but, as it had gone far enough, I turned my attention to the streets.

There was a quality in them not to be apprehended by the sense of sight. It defied at first my limited powers of analysis. Something to which I was accustomed was not there; and something was there to which I was not accustomed.

That to which I was not accustomed struck me soon as shimmering, shining, radiant. That it was not an outward radiance goes without saying. New York on that November day was as dreary and bleak a port as one could easily land at. A leaden sky cloaked the streets in a leaden, lifeless atmosphere. The tops of steeples and the roofs of the tall buildings were wreathed in a leaden mist. Patches of befouled snow on the ground, with the drifts of paper, rags, and refuse to which the New York eye is so inured that it doesn’t see them, lent to the side-streets through which we clattered an air of being so hopelessly sunk in dirt that it is no use trying to be any other way. Drays rumbled, motor-trucks honked, ferry-boats shrieked, tram-cars clanked, trains overhead crashed with a noise like that of the shell that had struck the _Assiniboia_, while our taxicab creaked and squeaked and spluttered like an old man putting on a speed he has long outlived. On the pavements a strange, strange motley of men and women—Hebrew, Slavic, Mongolian, negro, negroid—carried on trades as outlandish as themselves. Here and there an outlandish child shivered its way to an outlandish school. Only now and then one saw a Caucasian face, either clean, alert, superior, or brutalized and repulsive beyond anything to be seen among the yearning, industrious aliens.

And yet to me all was lit by an inner light of which I couldn’t at first see the lamp. I caught the rays without detecting the source that emitted them. In and through and above this squalid New York, with its tumult, its filth, its seeming indifference to the individual, there was a celestial property born of the kingdom of heaven. It shone in the sky; it quivered in the air; it lay restfully on the hoary graveyards nestling at the feet of prodigious cubes, like eld at the base of Time. All faces glowed with it; all tasks translated it; all the clamor of feet and wheels and whistles sang it like a song.

The name of it came to me with a cry of joy and a pang of grief simultaneously. It was peace. I was in a country that was not at war.

I had forgotten the experience. I had forgotten the sensation it produces. I had forgotten that there was a world in which men and women were free to go and come without let or hindrance. And here were people doing it. The day’s work claimed them, and nothing beyond the day’s work. To earn a living was an end in itself. The living earned, a man could enjoy it. The money he made he could spend; the house he built he could occupy; the motor he bought he could ride in; the wife he married he could abide with; the children he begot he could bring up. He could go on in this routine till he sickened and died and was buried in it. There was no terrific overruling motive to which all other motives had become subsidiary, and into which they merged.

In the countries I had been living in war was the sky overhead and the ground beneath the feet. One dreamed it at night, and one woke to it in the morning. It made everything its adjunct, every one its slave. Duty, wealth, love, devotion, had no other object on which to pour themselves out. It commanded, absorbed, monopolized. There was no home it didn’t visit, no pocket it didn’t rifle, no face it didn’t haunt, no heart it didn’t search and sift and strengthen and wrench upward—the process was always a hard, dragging, compulsive one—till the most wilful had become submissive and the most selfish had given all. Prayer was war; worship was war; art, science, philosophy, sport were war. Nothing else walked in the streets or labored in the fields or bought and sold in the shops. It was the next Universal after God.

And here, after God, a man was his own Universal. With no standard to which everything had to be referred he seemed unutterably care-free. Care-free was not a term I should have used of New York, of America, in the old days; but it was now the only one that applied. The people I saw going by on the sidewalks had nothing but themselves and their families to think of. Their only struggle was the struggle for food and shelter. Safe people, happy people, dwelling in an Eden out of the reach of cannon and gas and bomb!

“I came not to bring peace, but a sword!”

Sacrilegiously, perhaps, I was applying those words to myself as we jolted homeward. But I was applying them with a query. I was asking if it could possibly be worth while. All at once my mission became unreal, fantastic.

To begin with, it was beyond my powers. Among these hundreds of thousands of strangers I knew but a handful. Even on that handful I should make no impression. I could see at a glance, from the few words I had exchanged with people on the dock, that each man’s cup was full. You couldn’t pour another drop into it. I had subconsciously taken it for granted that my friends would be, as it were, waiting for me; and already it was evident that in their minds there would not be a vacant spot. I had not the will-power to force myself in on so much hurry and preoccupation.

Then I wasn’t interested in it any more. I had pretentiously thought of myself as dedicated to a cause, and now the cause had dissolved into nothing on this leaden, overcharged air. It would be ridiculous to wean these people away from their work, even if I could play like the Pied Piper and have them follow me. I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to marry the woman I loved, and settle down quietly, industriously, to spend my days in an office and my nights at home, like the countless human ants that were running to and fro. My celibacy of the will was gone. My consecration was gone. Where these austerities had been there was now only that yearning of whatever it is that draws a man toward a woman, and I asked nothing but the freedom to enjoy. I was determined to enjoy. The resolve came over me with this first glimpse of New York. It came over me in a tide of desire which was all the fiercer for its long repression. It may have been the demand of the flesh for compensation. That which had not merely been denied, but brutalized and broken, rose with the appetite of a starving beast.

So, thirdly, I was not fit for any high undertaking. It was not my real self that had made these vows; it was a phantasm self evoked by the vast emotions of a strife in which the passions raged on a scale that lifted the human temporarily out of itself. But now that the strife had been left behind, the human fell back into the same old rut.

In the same old rut I found myself. I had reverted to what I had been before there was a war at all. My carnal instincts were as strong as ever; as strong as ever was my longing for Regina Barry as my wife. It was stronger than ever, since I meant to get her by hook or by crook, if I couldn’t do it by the methods which colloquially we call straight.

It was, however, the difficulties of hook and crook that oppressed me. The straight line was in this case that of least resistance. I grew more convinced of it as the day advanced.

There was everything to make my return to the old quarters a moment of depression. The quarters themselves, which had seemed palatial after the Down and Out, were modest to the point of being squalid. As Cantyre had said, Lovey had kept them as clean as an operating-room, but cleanliness couldn’t relieve their dingy shabbiness or make up for the absence of daylight.

Moreover, Cantyre’s own proximity was trying to me. There was only the elbow of a corridor between his rooms and mine. He would resume the old chumming habits of running in and out, while I was sharpening a knife to stab him in the back.

And in the processes of unpacking Lovey got on my nerves. He got on my nerves as a sweet, old, fussy mother gets on those of a wayward son during the hours he is compelled to stay at home. Dogging me about from one room to another, his affection was like a draught of milk held out to a man whose lips are parched for brandy.

It was a relief, therefore, when the telephone rang and Annette van Elstine asked me to come and have tea with her. I knew that Annette was not craving to see me merely as her cousin; and as my cousin I could have waited patiently for the pleasure of seeing her; but with her scent for drama and her insatiable curiosity she would raise the issues of which I wanted to talk even if I got no good from it.

I found her as little changed as if Time had not passed nor War dropped his bomb on the world.

Annette’s smartness, as I have already told you, was difficult to define. It was not in looks or dress or manner of living or gifts of intellect. If I could ascribe it to a cause I should put it down as authority of position combined with the possession of a great many personal secrets. She knew your intimate history for the reason that she asked you intimate questions. Authority of position enabled her to do this—or at least she acted as if it did—with the right of a cross-examiner to probe the truth in court. She could convey the impression that her interest in your affairs was an honor—as if a queen were to put her royal finger in your family pie—so that quite artlessly you unlocked your heart to her. Other people’s unlocked hearts were her kingdom, since, as far as I could see, she had nothing in her own.

Also, as far as I could see, she wore the same tea-gown I had always seen her in; she sat in the same chair in front of the same fire; she had before her the same tea equipage; she might have been pouring the same tea.

The transition from the necessary questions as to my personal experiences and wounds to that of the exact relations between Mrs. Hartlepool and Gen. Lord Birkenhead was an easy one. Disappointed that I had spent two years at the front and had heard nothing of the delicate situation between these distinguished persons, of which an amazing mass of contradictory detail had reached certain circles in New York, she turned the conversation on what was really the matter in hand.

“So you came over on the same boat as Regina?”

Unable to deny this statement, I admitted its truth. The dusky ripples played over Annette’s round features, giving them a somber vivacity.

“Did she tell you anything?”

“Yes; a good many things.”

“Anything special, I mean?”

“Everything she said was special, as far as I can remember.”

She tried another avenue.

“You’ve gone back to your old quarters, haven’t you?”

“Yes; I kept them all the time I was away. Stupid, I suppose; but when I left New York I didn’t expect to be gone for more than a few weeks.”

“Stephen Cantyre is in that house, isn’t he?”

“On the same floor with me.”

“You’ll see a great deal of him, won’t you?”

“I did when I was there before.”

“Was he on the dock to meet Regina?”

“He was on the dock, either to meet her or to meet me. As a matter of fact, he met us both.”

“Did he say anything about her?”