Chapter XI: Part 11

“Yes; he said he had to go and speak to her.”

“Only to speak to her?”

“What more could he do—right there on the dock?”

“Oh, then you do know?”

“Know what?”

“What do you suppose? Can’t you guess?”

“I didn’t know you wanted me to guess. I thought you meant to tell me.”

“I can’t tell you what I don’t know myself—officially.”

“Do you know it in any other way?”

“I know it by signs and tokens.”

“One can infer a lot from them.”

“That’s just what I’ve done. It wasn’t till I heard that you’d come over in the same boat with her—”

The rest of the sentence was conveyed by a look which invited me to go on.

“You thought I might be able to corroborate the signs and tokens?”

“Or contradict them—if it’s not a rude thing to say.”

I wriggled away from the frontal attack. “Why should it be rude?”

“Oh, well, I’m the last person in the world to go poking into other people’s business.”

“Exactly.”

“Only people do like to tell me things.”

“I can quite understand that—when they’ve anything to tell.”

“Which is what I thought you might have.”

“How could I have anything to tell when I’ve just spent two years in trenches and hospitals?”

“You haven’t been in trenches and hospitals during the last ten days. Oh, don’t say anything if you don’t want to. I’m not in the least curious.”

“Of course you’re not. No one would ever think so.”

“I’ve only been—well, just a little afraid.”

“What were you afraid of?”

“Of the situation. I suppose it wasn’t an accident that you took the boat that she was on?”

“No, it wasn’t an accident. But what has that to do with it?”

“Just that much—that you did it on purpose.”

“So that you were afraid on my account?”

“No; on hers. You see, she’s been so terribly talked about that now that it’s beginning again—”

“Oh, it’s beginning again, is it?”

She said, mysteriously, “Stephen Cantyre is rather a goose, you know.”

“In what way?”

“In the way of dropping hints when he’d much better keep still. He’s so crazy about her—”

“It’s a pity for him to be dropping hints if he isn’t sure.”

“Oh, he must be sure enough! After the way she treated him before, he’d never expose himself to the same thing the second time. It isn’t that he’s not sure. It’s just the way he does it—confiding in every one, but only saying that he hopes.”

“If he only hopes, it doesn’t bind any one but himself.”

“It isn’t a question of binding; it’s one of the situation. If she’s let him hope—the second time—she’s bound. If it was only the first time—or if she hadn’t made such an insane reputation for herself—don’t you see?—the whole thing is in that.”

“I should think the whole thing was in whether or not she was in love with him.”

“Well, it isn’t. If she was as much in love with somebody else as Juliet she couldn’t throw over Stephen Cantyre now. She’d have to be put under restraint if she did—shut up in some sort of ward. The community wouldn’t stand for it.”

“It might be a nine days’ wonder, of course.”

“It would be one of those nine days’ wonders that last all your life. She’d be done for.” She went on in another key. “But, of course, her father and mother wouldn’t let her. They’re delighted. He’s very well off—and a good fellow, who’ll give her everything she wants.”

“But what good will that do if she doesn’t care for him?”

Her animation went into the eclipse that always came over her when she touched the heart of things.

“What makes you think she doesn’t—if it’s not a rude question?”

“The fact that she turned him down before.”

She broke in with that directness which she never hesitated to make use of when the time came.

“You don’t think she cares anything about you?”

I considered two or three ways of meeting this, the one I adopted being to put on a rather inane smile.

“What if she did?”

“She’d just have to get over it, that’s all. You, too!”

“Why?”

“I needn’t tell you why. You must see for yourself. Or, rather, I’ve told you already. There are ways in which an engagement is more important than a marriage—any engagement; and when it’s a second engagement to the same man—If she’d been married to him, and couldn’t get along, why, no one would think the worse of her if she got a divorce and married some one else. She would have given him a try; she would have done her best. But just to take him up and put him down, and take him up and put him down again, without trying him at all—my dear Frank, it isn’t done!”

“But suppose we did it?”

“In that case it might be the world well lost for love—but the world would be lost; and you needn’t be under any misconception about it. Personally I’d stand by any one through almost anything; I have stood by Regina in the past when lots of other women have given her the cold shoulder because of her—”

“Call it anything you like. Most of us have other names for it. All I want to say now is that I wouldn’t stand by her in this; nor by you, either. If you had come to me when you were in your other troubles—three or four years ago—you’d have found me just the same as if you’d been keeping straight. Any one can go to the bad. There isn’t a family that hasn’t some one who’s done it. But this would be the kind of thing— Frank, old boy, I’m telling you right now, so that you’ll know where you stand with me. I’d have to be the first to cut you both.”

To this there were several retorts I could have made, any of them quite crushing to Annette; but I was thinking of the practical difficulties before us. The rôle of unscrupulous coquette was the last in which Regina would care to appear; that of cad was equally distasteful to me. Had it been possible to make one plunge and be over with it, it would have been different; as it was, the preliminaries—the facing of all the people who would have to be faced—the explaining all the things that would have to be explained—couldn’t but be devilish.

I was just beginning, “Why should you assume that we are thinking of any such thing—?”

But before I could finish the sentence the door opened gently and a maid’s voice announced, “Mrs. Barry.”

Of all the people in the world, this lady was the last I wanted to meet at that moment. Knowing how I must have figured in her eyes in the past, I was planning for the future to figure in a worse light still. I had thrown her kindness back in her face and never given her an explanation. She must have known that my seeming flight from Long Island after that last Sunday in June, 1914, had left her daughter unhappy; and the reason had remained a mystery.

She gave me the first glance as she entered, and only the second to our hostess. The awful severity of those who are temperamentally gentle and unjudging was in the very coldness of her eye.

She was a charming, delicate, semi-invalid woman who seemed to have been spun, like the clothes she wore, out of the least durable materials in life. Regina had the same traits, but harder, stronger, and more lasting. It was difficult to think of the latter as an invalid; while you couldn’t see the mother as anything else.

Prettily old-fashioned, she seemed not to have changed her style of dressing since the eighteen-seventies. The small bonnet might have dated from the epoch of professional beauties when Mrs. Langtry was a girl. The long fur pelisse with loose hanging sleeves was of no period at all. I think she wore a train. In her own house she habitually did, and she seemed to have just flung on the pelisse and driven down the Avenue in her motor.

She greeted me politely, without enthusiasm, but with due regard to the fact that I was a wounded hero home from the wars. Talking of the invasion of Rumania, she showed herself much more alive to America’s international duty than any of the few men I had met since my landing.

“I wish we could get my husband and Stephen to see things that way,” she continued, sweetly, over her tea-cup. “They’re so pacifist, both of them. My husband feels that we’ve nothing to do with it, and Stephen is opposed to war on any ground. You must talk to him, Mr.—or captain, isn’t it? Oh, major? You must talk to him, Major Melbury. He’ll listen to you.” She turned to Annette. “You know, Annette, I just ran in to share our good news with you. Regina and Stephen—they’ve made it up again—and they’re so happy!” An oblique glance included me. She was getting the satisfaction that women receive from a certain kind of revenge. “Poor darling! You don’t know how hard she’s tried, Annette. People haven’t understood her. All she’s wanted was to be sure of herself—and now she is. She’s really been in love with Stephen all these years, only she didn’t know it. That is, she knew it; and yet—But I’m sure you see it. You’re one of the few who’ve never been unkind to her. She wanted me to tell you. She’ll be so glad to have you know it, too, Major Melbury. Perhaps she told you on the boat. I think she said she did. I don’t quite remember. There’s been so much to say in the last few hours. There always is at such a time, don’t you think?... No; they’re not going to announce an engagement. It would only make more talk, after all the talk there’s been. One of these days they’ll be married—without saying anything about it. And, oh!—I know you’ll be interested, Annette, though it may bore Major Melbury—Stephen has bought that very nice house—the Endsleigh Jarrotts lived in it for a little while—on Park Avenue near Sixty-sixth Street. Ralph Coningsby is going to remodel it for them, and I’m sure it will be awfully attractive. That’s where they’ll live.”

It was my opportunity. I could have shouted out there and then and made a scene.

Do you think me a coward for not doing it? Do you think me a fool?

All kinds of speeches were hot within me—and I kept them back. More correctly, I didn’t keep them back; I simply couldn’t utter them. I couldn’t give pain to this sweet lady sipping her tea so contentedly; I couldn’t give pain to Annette. Annette was enjoying the situation in which we found ourselves; the sweet lady had got compensation for months, for years, of wondering and unhappiness in those seemingly artless words, “She’s really been in love with Stephen all these years, only she didn’t know it.” I knew they were spoken for my benefit. Between the lines, between the syllables, they said, “And if you think she was ever in love with you you’re wrong.” Whether the sweet lady believed her own statements or not made little difference. It would gratify her all her life to remember that she had had the chance of making them.

So I came away, following the line of least resistance, because I didn’t see what else I could do.

I didn’t see what else I could do when Cantyre came into my bedroom late that night.

I knew he would be dining at the Barrys’, and that he would come looking me up after his return. To avoid him I had the choice between staying out and going to bed. My physical condition kept me from staying out very late, and so I took the other alternative. It made no difference, however, since he waked Lovey by pounding on the door, and insisted on coming in.

Dropping into the arm-chair beside my bed, with no light but that which streamed in behind him from the sitting-room, he took me on my weak side by beginning to talk about the war.

I have said that my mission had become unreal and fantastic, but that was only in relation to my personal fitness for the task. That the war was a holy war, to be fought to a holy end, remained the alpha and omega of my convictions. And to Cantyre war of any kind was plainly unholy war, productive of unholy reactions. What I felt as he talked may best be expressed by Lovey’s words next morning when he betrayed the fact that he had been listening.

“Didn’t it get yer goat, Slim, the way the doctor went on last night?”

It did get my goat, and I restrained myself only because I had been warned in London to be patient with Americans. “You must treat them as wise parents treat their sons,” I had been told. “Help them to see for themselves—and when they do that you can trust them.” So the best I could do was to help Cantyre to see for himself; and to make any headway in that I had to pretend to be tolerant.

“No one contends that war is the ideal method for settling human difficulties,” I admitted; “but as long as human society stands on certain planks in its platform there’ll be no other way.”

“Then isn’t this the time to take another way?”

“No; because you’ve got to change your bases of existence first. You can’t change your effects without first changing your causes, any more than you can graft an apple on an oak.”

“But even without removing the cause you can still sometimes nip the effect.”

“Which is what in the present instance we tried to do, and didn’t succeed in. All the trend of education during thirty years has been in the direction of eliminating war, while still keeping the principle that makes for war as part of the foundation of our life. We created a system of international law; we set up a Hague Tribunal; many of us had come to the conclusion that no great war could ever again take place; but the law by which human beings prefer as yet to live outwitted us and brought war upon us whether we would or not. So long as you keep the causes you must have the effects.”

“Then let us do away with the causes.”

“Yes! Let us. Only, to do that in time for the present situation we should have begun five hundred years ago. You can’t put out the fire the ages have kindled as you’d blow out a candle. When you’ve spent centuries in preparing your mine, and fixed a time fuse to make it explode, you’ve nothing to do but to let it go off. This war wasn’t made overnight. The world has been getting ready for it as long as there have been human beings to look askance at one another. Now we’ve got it—with all its horrors, but also with all its compensations.”

“Compensations for the lives it has ruined?”

“In the lives it has saved—yes. You’ll never get its meaning unless you see it as a great regenerative process.”

“Do you mean to tell me that we can only be regenerated by fire and sword and rapine?”

“Not at all! We’re regenerated by courage and honor and sacrifice and the sense that every man gets—every Tommy, every poilu, every bluejacket—that he personally is essential to man’s big fight in his struggle upward. It’s one of the queer things of the whole business that out of the greatest wrong human beings can inflict on one another—to go to war with them—there can come the highest benefits to every individual who gets himself ready to receive them. It makes one believe in an intelligence compelling the race toward good, however much we may be determined to go the other way.”

He tuned his voice to a new key.

“Oh, I’ve never doubted that; and now, old chap, now I—I see it.”

I knew what was coming. It was the great subject that could eclipse even that of the war. I had just force to pull the bedclothes up about my mouth and mutter a suffocated, “How?”

“What I hinted this morning. It’s all—it’s all come right. I used to think it never would, sometimes. And then—don’t laugh, old boy!—but then I’d say to myself that God would never have made me feel as I did unless He meant something to come of it. Religion keeps telling you to trust; and I did trust—on and off.”

Again I had an opportunity; but again such words as rose in me choked themselves back in my throat. I could have told him that she was ready to come to me if I lifted a finger. I knew I should have to tell him sometime, and it occurred to me that it might as well be now. It was the words that failed me, not the intention; or if it was the intention, it was the intention in any degree that made it compulsory.

I don’t think he noticed that I said nothing, for he went falteringly on:

“It’s a wonderful thing to be happy, Frank. I’ve never been happy before in my life. I’m a pusillanimous sort of bloke, and there’s the truth. I wasn’t happy at home, or at school, or at college, or in any of the hospitals where I worked; and I never made any friends. You must know I’ve been queer when I say that women have always looked at me as if I was outside of their range. They’ve never made up to me in the way they do to most fellows with a bit of money and not deformed. Regina—there! I’ve said her name—she was the very first who ever took the trouble to be more than just decently civil.”

I managed to stammer the words, “What did she do?”

“Oh, nothing very much—not at first. She seemed to think—she used to say it—that I was different from most men. That’s what she appeared to be on the lookout for. All the other chaps she knew were so much alike, and I—Well, that’s how it began. She wanted the unusual—and I turned up. After a while she thought I wasn’t unusual enough—said it in so many words—But you know that story. I’ve told you too many times already.”

“And now?”

“She thinks she’ll marry me.”

He brought out the statement in a voice all awe and amazement.

“She only thinks?”

“Oh, she will. She wouldn’t say anything about it if she didn’t mean—”

“And—and you’re going to—to let her?”

“Let her? Why, man, you might as well ask me if I’d let God forgive my sins if He said He’d do it.”

“God could forgive your sins and not be any the worse off Himself.”

He sprang forward in his chair, grabbing at the bedclothes.

“Frank, I swear to you it will be the same with her. She’ll never be sorry. I’ll never let her. She’ll be like God to me. I’ll make my whole life worship and service.”

“If that’s what she wants.”

“It’s what every woman wants, so they say. They just ask to be loved; and when you love them enough—” He uttered a little shrill laugh, in which there was a touch of the hysterical that was always somewhere about him. “God! Frank, it’s wonderful! Even you who know her can’t imagine what it means to a lonely bloke like me.”

I pumped myself up to a great effort.

“Suppose”—I had to moisten my lips before going on—“suppose she was to play you the same trick she played you before?”

“She wouldn’t.”

In spite of his evident conviction, I pressed the question.

“But if she did?”

He threw off in a tone that seemed careless: “In that case there’d be just one thing for me to do. I’d leave her everything I possess—I’m doing that as it is—and, well, you can guess the rest. I—I couldn’t go through all that again. The first time—well, I just pulled it off; but the second—”

It was the old story. They all seemed to have the second time on the brain. I, too, was getting it on the brain. It was like a trip-hammer pounding in my head.

I forced myself, however, to make some foolish, semi-jovial speech in which there was no congratulation, begging him, then, for the love of Heaven, to clear out, as I wanted to go to sleep.

_CHAPTER XXV_

No record of the next few weeks exists for me. I suppose I must have done things—little things. I must have gone in and out, and eaten my meals, and fulfilled Lovey’s orders—for, lacking volition of my own, I was entirely at his command. But the recollection of it all has passed from me. I remember reading in some one’s reminiscences of prison life that the weeks of solitary confinement went by; but the released prisoner could not say how. Nothing remained with him, apparently, but a big, black blur; and of these first weeks in New York it was all that stayed with me.

I know that Christmas came and went, and that I spent the festival at Atlantic City. I did this in a wild hope, which I knew was idiotic when I formed it. I told Lovey what I was about to do; I knew he, in the course of his valeting, which he still kept up, would tell Cantyre; I guessed that Cantyre would tell Regina; and I hoped—it never really amounted to hoping, I only dreamed—that Regina might find the moment a favorable one for slipping away and joining me. Then we should actually do the thing so impossible to plan.

But, of course, nothing came of it; and I returned to New York more unsatisfied than I had gone away. The sense of being unsatisfied sent me at last to Sterling Barry’s door.

You will observe that I had not talked with Regina since our last night on board ship. On the morning of landing her quick movements, as compared with my slow, lumbering ones, enabled her to elude me. Since our landing my will had been positively paralyzed. Those words of hers, “Oh, Frank, I hope you won’t make me!” were always in my memory; but the very sense that I could use the power held me back from doing it. I meant to use it; but as each minute came round when I might have taken a step toward that end I seemed to fall backward, like the men who went out with swords and staves to take the Christ.

But two days after my return from Atlantic City I came to the conclusion that I could wait no longer. I could go and call on her at least. For the family it would mean no more than that I had come to offer my congratulations. For her—but I could tell that only by being face to face with her.

The old manservant recognized me on coming to the door. He was sorry that Miss Barry had gone to tea with Miss van Elstine, and was sure his mistress would be sorry, too. Moreover, they had all heard of my prowess in battle, and were proud of me.

So I drove round in my taxi to Annette’s.

The maid would have ushered me straight up to the library, but I preferred to send in my card. As I was being conducted up-stairs a minute later I had the privilege of hearing a few words which I am sure Annette intended for my ear.

“Well, I don’t mind this once, Regina; but I can’t have it going on.... Yes, I know it’s an accident; but it’s an accident that mustn’t continue to happen. The very fact that he’s my cousin obliges me to be the more careful. It wouldn’t be fair to your father and mother if I were to let you come here—”

“But, Annette, this once is all I’m asking for.”

“And all I mean to grant.”

I could tell by Annette’s voice that she was retreating to another room, so that by the time I entered Regina stood there alone. Before I knew what I was doing I held both her hands in mine and was kissing them.

It is an odd fact that on raising my eyes I saw her features for the first time since that summer afternoon at Rosyth. On board ship she had always worn the yashmak; and on the dock she had been too far away to allow of my seeing more than that she was there.

The face I saw now was not like Annette’s, untouched by the passage of time and suffering and world agony. You might have said that in its shadows and lines and intensities the whole history of the epoch was expressed. It was one of those twentieth-century faces—they are women’s faces, as a rule—on which the heroic in our time has stamped itself in lineaments which neither paint nor marble could reproduce. It flashed on me that the transmigrated soul had traveled farther than I had suspected.

I don’t know what we said to each other at first. They were no more than broken things, not to be set down by the pen. When I came to the consciousness of my actual words I was saying, “I’m going to make you, Regina; I’m going to make you.”

She responded like a child who recognizes power, but has no questionings as to right and wrong.

“Are you, Frank? How?”

“In any way that suggests itself.” I added, helplessly, “I don’t know how.”

“I’ll do whatever you tell me,” she said, simply and submissively.

“Then will you just walk away with me some afternoon—and be married—without saying anything to any one?”

“If you say so.”

“When shall we do it?”

“Whenever you like.”

“Next week?”

“If that suits you.”

“Would it suit you?”

She bent her head and was silent. I repeated the question with more insistence.

“Would it suit you, Regina?”

“There’s no question of suiting me. I’ve got myself where I can’t be”—she smiled, a twitching, nervous smile—“where I can’t be suited.”

“Do you mean that you’d come with me—when you wouldn’t want to?”

“Something like that.”

“Why should you?”

“I’ve told you that. I’ve—I’ve let you see it—in what I’ve been doing for the past two years.”

“So that I’m absolutely master?”

“That’s it.”

I turned away from her, walking to the other end of the long room. When I came back she was standing as I had left her, humbly, with eyes downcast, like a slave-girl put up for sale.

I paused in front of her.

“Do you know that your abandonment of will puts us both in an extraordinary position?”

“Yes.” She went on presently, “But I know, too, that where you’re concerned my will-power has left me.”

“But that isn’t like you.”

She shook her head.

“No, it isn’t. Generally my will is rather strong. But in this case— You see—I’d—I’d waited so long—and I’d never believed that you—that you cared anything—and now that I know you do—well, it’s simply made me helpless. I’ve—I’ve no will at all.”

“So that I must have enough for two?”

“I suppose so.”

“And if I—if I carry you off—and make every one unhappy—and put you in a position where you’d be—where you’d be done for—that’s what Annette calls it—the responsibility would be all mine?”

“I should never reproach you.”

“In words.”

“Nor in thought—if I could help it.”

“But you mightn’t be able to help it.”

To this there was no reply. I took another turn to the end of the room. My freedom of action was terrifying. Since I could do with her what I liked, I was afraid to do anything. I came back and said so.

The old Regina woke as she murmured, “If you’re afraid to do anything—do nothing.”

“And what would you do?”

“I should let things take their course.”

“Let things take their course—and marry him?”

“If things took their course that way.”

“Do you mean that they mightn’t take their course that way?”

“I’m not married to him yet. There are—there are difficulties.”

I caught her by the arm. “Of what kind?”

“Of opinion chiefly—but of very vital opinion.”

“Do you mean about the war?”

She said with a force like that of a suppressed cry: “He wants me not to have anything more to do with it! And I—I can’t stop—not while it’s going on. I—I must be doing something. It’s one of the reasons why I could marry him—that he’s a doctor—and I could take him over there—where they need him so much.”

“And he won’t go?”

“He doesn’t say that exactly; but he doesn’t want to. He thinks it’s all wrong—that when it comes to brutality, one side is as bad as the other.”

“Oh, he’ll get over that—if you insist; and then you’ll marry him.”

“Perhaps so—if I haven’t already married you.”

“What makes you think you may have married me?”

“You said you’d make me.”

And in the end, when Annette came back, we left it at that, with everything up in the air.

_CHAPTER XXVI_

More weeks followed, of which my record is chiefly in the drama of public events.

Vast as these were at the time, they seem even vaster in the retrospect. As my memory goes back to them they are like prodigious portents in the sky, awful to look at and still more awful to think about. A time will come when we shall find it amazing merely to have lived through such happenings.

Before the invaders the Rumanian towns were going down like houses built of blocks. In her attitude to Rumania, Russia was a mystery—a husband who sees his wife fighting for her life and doing hardly anything to help her. The rumors, true or false, that reached us might have been torn from some stupendous, improbable romance—a feeble Czar, a beautiful and traitorous Czarina, a corrupt nobility, an army betrayed, a people seething in dreams and furies and ignorance. Washington, having gone so far as to ask the Allied nations their peace conditions, had received them—restitution, reparation, and future security. Then late in that month of January, 1917, there came to people like me an unexpected shock. Before the Senate President Wilson delivered the speech of which the tag that ran electrically round the world was peace without victory.

I mention these things because they are the only waymarks of a time during which my private life seemed to be drearily and hopelessly at a standstill. The deadlock of the nations reacted on myself. Mentally I was at grips with destiny, but nothing made any progress. I was exactly where I had started, as regards Regina, as regards Cantyre, as regards Annette, as regards the father and mother Barry. Outwardly I was on friendly terms with them all, and on no more than friendly terms with any one.

The Barrys invited me to dinner, and I went. Cantyre made up a theater party—he was fond of this form of recreation—and I went to that. Annette asked me to a Sunday lunch at which Cantyre and Regina were guests. The force of organized life held us together as a cohesive group; the operation of conventional good manners kept us to courtesies. That any one was happy I do not believe; but life threw its mask even on unhappiness.

I got in, of course, an occasional word with Regina, which, nevertheless, didn’t help me. As far as I could observe, she lived and moved in a kind of hypnotic state, from which nothing I knew how to say could wake her. She was always waiting for me to give the word, and I was afraid to give it. If there was hypnotism, it affected us both, since I was as deeply in the trance as she.

Now and then, however, she came out of it with some brief remark which gave me a lead and perhaps made me hope. One such occasion was at the theater. Cantyre had not put me next to her, but there was an entr’acte when I found his place empty and slipped into it.

“And how are events taking their course?” I asked, with a semblance of speaking cheerily.

“I’m waiting to see.”

“Still?”

“Still.”

“And how long is that to go on?”

“Till events have shaped their course in a way that will tell me what to do.”

“How shall you know that?”

“How does the twig know when the current takes it from the spot where it has been caught and carries it down-stream?”

“Oh, but you’ve got intelligence.”

“Any intelligence I’ve got implores me to keep on waiting.”

“So that you’re not going to be married right away?”

“I shall not be married till I see it’s the obvious thing to do.”

“Not even to me?”

“That’s different. I’ve already told you—”

“That if I give the word— But don’t you see I can’t give it?”

“Exactly. You’re waiting for the sign as much as I am.”

“What sign?”

“We shall recognize it when the time comes.”

“Where will it come from?”

“Right up out of life; I don’t know where, nor how.”

“Who’ll give it to us?”

She had only time, as Cantyre returned to his seat, to send me a long, slantwise look, with the underscored words, “You know!”

Another time was in the regrouping of guests, after Annette’s luncheon. Finding myself beside her at a window, I asked the plain question, “Are you engaged to Cantyre?”

“I’m just where I was when I told you about it on board ship. He hasn’t asked me to be more definite.”

“Is he just where he was?”

“I think he is, in that—in that he expects me to marry him.”

“And you leave him under that impression?”

“I don’t know what else to do—till I get the sign.”

“You’re still looking for that?”

“Yes. Aren’t you?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Oh, but you are, whether you’re aware of it or not.”

“And suppose he urges you before the sign comes?”

“I shall still wait.”

“And suppose I urged you?”

“I’d take that as the sign.”

And after the guests went I stayed behind and told the whole story to Annette. So long as there were no clandestine meetings under her roof, she was as detached and sympathetic and non-committal as a chorus in a Greek play.

“Why don’t you give her the sign, if it’s not a rude question?” she asked, while a marvelous succession of ripples circled over her duskiness.

“Because I’m afraid to. Think what it would mean to Cantyre, who’s been so white with me all these years.”

“As well as to every one concerned, including herself and you. I’m glad you’ve enough common sense to feel that. See here, Frank,” she went on, kindly, “you’ve got to pull yourself out of this state of mind. It’s doing you no good. When you ought to be at work for your country, which needs you desperately, you’re sulking over a love-affair. Buck up! Be a sport! Be a man! There are lots of nice girls in New York. I’ll find you some one.”

But at that I ran away.

_CHAPTER XXVII_

Within a few days I saw the correctness of Annette’s summing up.

A medieval legend tells of an angel being sent to Satan with the message that God meant to take from the devil all the temptations with which he had seduced mankind. To this Satan resigned himself because he couldn’t help it, begging of the angel that he should be left with just one—and that the least important. “Which?” asked the angel. “Depression,” said Satan. The angel considered the request, found that depression cut but slight figure as a sin, and went back to heaven, leaving it behind him. “Good!” laughed Satan, as the celestial vision faded out. “In this one gift I’ve secured the whole bag of tricks.”

And that is what I was to find.

I was depressed on leaving Europe. I grew more depressed because of the experience on board ship. In New York I was still more depressed. There was a month in which all things worked together for evil; and then I came to the place at which Satan had desired to have me.

I have not said that during all this time I made no attempt to look up my old friends at the Down and Out or, beyond an occasional argument with Cantyre, to fulfil the mission with which I had been intrusted. Ralph Coningsby had come and offered me work, and I had refused it. Even the march of public events, with the introduction of lawless submarine warfare and the breaking off of diplomatic relations between Germany and the United States, hadn’t roused me. I marked the slow rise of the impulse toward war in the breasts of the American people, as passionless and as irresistible as an incoming tide, but it seemed to have nothing to do with me. I was out of it, flung aside by a fate that had made sport of me.

I was so far from the current of whatever could be called life that I grew apathetic. Though I hadn’t seen Regina for weeks, I sat down under the impalpable obstacles between us, making no effort to overcome them. I ate and drank and slept and brooded on the futility of living, and let the doing so fill my time. Lovey was worried, and dogged me round till there were minutes when I could have sprung on him and choked him.

Then came the afternoon when I decided that Satan must have his way.

There is a hotel in New York of which I had many recollections because I had frequented its barroom in the days before I went altogether down. It is a somewhat expensive-looking barroom, with heavy mahogany, gilded cornices, and frescoes of hunting-scenes on the wall. Hanging over the bar at any time during the day or night can be seen all the types that are commonly known as sporting, from the dashing to the cheap.

They might have been the same as on that day when I turned my back upon the place five years previously. They hung in the same attitudes; they called for the same drinks; they used the same profanities, though with some novelty in the slang. With my limp, my black patch, and my general haggardness, I felt like a ghost returning among them.

Timidly I approached a barman at leisure and asked for a cocktail of a brand for which I used to have a liking. I carried it off to a table placed inconspicuously behind the door leading to and from the hotel. Putting it on the table, I stared at its amber reflections.

I had come back to the same old place at last. It was curious; but there I was. All my struggling, all my wandering, all my up-hill work, all my days and nights in the trenches, all my suffering, all my love—everything had combined together to land me just here, where, so to speak, I had begun. It was the old story of dragging up the cliff, only to fall over the precipice. It seemed to be my fate. There was no escaping it.

I might not take more than that one drink during that afternoon; but I knew it would be a beginning. I should come back again; and I should come back again after that. Another type of man would do nothing of the kind; but I was my own type.

Very deliberately I said good-by to the world I had known for the past three years and more. I said good-by to work, to ambition, to salvation, to country, to love. Back, far back in my mind I was saying the same deliberate good-by to God. I shouldn’t rest now till everything was gone.

The glass was still untasted on the table. I was taking my time. The farewells on which I was engaged couldn’t be hurried. The fate in store for me would wait.

Then the door behind which I sat began to open. It opened slowly, timidly, stealthily, as if the person entering was afraid to come in. The action stirred the curiosity, and I watched.

Before I saw a face I saw a hand. Rather, I saw four fingers from the knuckles to the nails, as if some one was steadying himself by the sheer force of holding on. They were old, thin, twisted fingers, and I knew at a glance I had seen them before.

The door continued to open, stealthily, timidly, slowly; and then, looking like a spirit rather than a man—a neat, respectable spirit wearing a silver star in his buttonhole, with trembling hands and a woeful quiver to the corner of his lower lip—Lovey stood in the barroom.

He stood as if he had never been in any such place before. He was like a visitant from some other sphere—dazed, diaphanous, unearthly.

He didn’t look at the table behind the door. His gaze was far off. I could see it scanning the backs of the hangers across the bar. Then it went over the tables one by one, traveling nearer and nearer.

Just before the dim eyes reached me I said: “Hello, Lovey! Come and sit down. What’ll you have to drink?”

There seemed to be an interval between hearing my voice and actually seeing me—an interval during which a frosty, unnatural color, as if snow were suddenly to take fire, flared in his waxlike cheek. But he came to the table and dropped into a round-backed chair.

“Oh, Slim!”

Leaning on the table, he covered his face with his hand.

I tried putting up a bluff. “What’s the matter, Lovey? Haven’t got a headache, have you?”

He raised those pitiful, dead blue eyes. “No, but I’ve got a ’eartache, Slim—a ’eartache I won’t never get over.”

“Why, why—” I began to rally him.

“It’s just what I was afeared of—for days and days I’ve been afeared of it. Been a-watchin’ of you, I ’ave.”

Here was another transmigrated soul that had traveled farther than I knew. It was in pure curiosity as to the changes wrought in him that I said: “I should think you would have been glad, Lovey. When I was here before you used to want to have us both go back.”

The extinct eyes were raised on me.

“These times ain’t them times. Everything different. I ’aven’t stayed where I was in them days, not any more nor you. Oh, to think, to think!”

“To think what?”

“That you should ’ave come back to this—and me believin’ the war ’ad done ye good—lifted you up, like. Not but what you was the best man ever lived before the war—”

“Oh no, Lovey. No one knows what I was better than yourself.”

“You was good even then, sonny—even in them awful old days. Goodness ain’t just in doin’ certain things; it’s in being certain things. I don’t ’ardly know what it is; but I can tell it when I see it. And I seen it in you, Slim—right from the first. Me and God A’mighty seen it together. That’s why He pulled you up out o’ what you was—and made you rich—and dressed you in swell clo’es—and sent you to the war—and made you a ’ero—and stuck you all over with medals—and brought you ’ome again to me. And if you’d only waited—”

“Well, if I’d only waited—what?”

“You’d ’a’ got somethink better still. You’d ’a’ got it pretty soon.”

“What should I have got?”

“I ain’t a-goin’ to tell ye. If you’d come ’ome with me you’d see.” Before I could follow up this dark hint he continued: “God A’mighty don’t play no tricks on His children. Look at me! All He’s give me. Kep’ me well while you was away—and ’elped me to knock off the booze when it was mortal ’ard to do it—and pervided me with a good ’ome, thanks to you, Slim!—and work—and wages—and a very nice man to work for, all except bein’ a bit stuck on ’isself—and let me off washin’ windows, which was never a trade for an eddicated man like me—and brought you back to me, which was the best thing of all—and just because I waited.”

“What do you mean by waiting?”

“I mean waitin’ for Him. That’s somethink I’ve found out since you went away, sonny. It’s a tip as Beady Lamont give me. You’ve got to wait patient-like for Him; and if you do He’ll come to you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you don’t. That’s why I’m a-tellin’ of you. It was like this: When you went away it was somethink fierce for me—nothink but that empty flat—and everythin’ speakin’ to me o’ you, like—yer clo’es and yer boots and yer books and yer pipes, and the chairs you used to sit on, and the bed you used to sleep in—and everythink like that—till I thought I was goin’ crazy. Many’s the time I wanted to come and do just what you’re a-doin’ of now—but I’d think o’ the promise I give you before ye went—and I’d ’ang on a bit more. And then God A’mighty Hisself come and spoke to me, just as He did to Beady Lamont that time he told us about when we was in the blue stars.”

“And what did God Almighty say?”

“He come in the middle o’ the night, and woke me up out of a sound sleep—”

“How did you know it was He?”

“Oh, I knowed. Ye couldn’t ’elp knowin’.”

“Did you hear His voice?”

“Ye didn’t ’ave to ’ear. It just went all over ye, like. I sits up in bed, and everything was dark and light at the same time, and something awful comfortin’ like sweepin’ through and through me. Ye couldn’t ’ardly say it was ’earin’ or seein’ or feelin’ or nothink. It was just understandin’, like—but you knowed it was there.”

“But you haven’t told me what He said.”

“That’s what I’m a-comin’ to. He says: ‘Lovey,’ says He, ‘you’ve put up a good fight, and now ye’re over the worst of it. But I’m with ye all the time,’ says He; ‘only I can’t give ye everythin’ to oncet. All ye can take is what ye’ve made yerself fit to receive,’ says He; ‘because there was a good many years in yer life when ye wasn’t fit to receive nothink. But just you wait, and you’ll see ’ow good I’ll be to you by degrees,’ says He. ‘You go on fightin’ in your way, just as that young fella, Slim, is fightin’ in his way, and I’ll do you both good, and bring you back to each other,’ says He. And, oh, sonny, He’s kep’ His word—all but right up till now, when you’ve been goin’ about that sad-like—and not wantin’ to be ’ome. And now this!”

“But that’s not God, Lovey; that’s me.”

“I don’t see much difference. The most ways I gets a’old o’ God, as you might say, is through the nice things people does for me—and the nice people theirselves—especially men—I don’t ’old with women—and more particular you, Slim—you that was more to me than my own children ever was—than my own life—yes, sonny, than my own life. I ain’t a-goin’ to live very long now—”

“What makes you think so?”

“I ’appen to know,” he replied, briefly. “There’s ways you can tell.”

“What ways?”

“Smellin’, for one thing. Ye can smell death just as easy as ye can smell flowers, or the fryin’ o’ fish, or any other smell; and it’s a sign ye’ll never be mistook in.” His ascetic profile was thrown up, with a long sniff through his delicate, quivering nostrils. “I can smell it now—just like the smell o’ liquor.” The profile came down, and he went on, eagerly: “But what I’m tellin’ you is that if I could die to save you from what ye’re beginnin’ to do this day, Slim, I’d do it cheerful. I knowed you was bent on it before ye knowed it yerself. I’ve been a-watchin’ on ye, and follerin’ you about when ye didn’t see me.”

“How did you know?”

“I can’t tell ye ’ow—not no more than I could tell you I knowed it was God. It don’t matter ’ow you know things as long as you know them, does it?”

“Perhaps not.”

“I’ve just been a-livin’ in yer skin ever since ye come ’ome, sonny. It was as if all yer thoughts passed through my mind, and all yer feelin’s through my ’eart. I ain’t much of a ’and at love—that kind of female love, I mean—not now, I ain’t; but I know that when ye’re young it kind o’ ketches you—”

“Stop, Lovey,” I said, warningly.

“All right, Slim, I’ll stop. I don’t need to go on. All I want to say is that you don’t know—you couldn’t know—the fancy I’ve took to you—and I used to think that you kind o’ ’ad a fancy for me, like.”

“So I have.”

The mild eyes searched me. There was a violent trembling of the lower lip.

“Do you mean that, Slim?” Before I could answer he added, proudly: “I don’t need to ’ave no one sayin’ they’ve got a fancy for me when they ’aven’t.”

“Oh, but it’s true!”

Two shivering hands were stretched out toward me in dramatic appeal.

“Oh, then leave that there drink alone and come ’ome along o’ me.” His eyes fell on the glass. “’Ow many o’ them things ’ave ye ’ad?”

“None yet; this is the first; and I haven’t tasted it.”

He straightened himself up, speaking with what I can only call a kind of exaltation.

“Then God A’mighty has sent me to you in time. It’s Him—and except Him ’tain’t no one nor nothink. Slim, if you puts yer lips to that glass now ye’ll be sinnin’ in His face just as much as if it was Him and not me as was a-pleadin’ with ye.”

“It isn’t a sin to take a cocktail.”

“Not for every one, I don’t suppose. It wouldn’t be for the doctor; and it wouldn’t be for Mr. Coningsby; but ’tis for me, and ’tis for you. There’s take-it-and-leave-it people in the world, and there’s take-it-and-be-damned; and you and me belongs to the last. Oh, Slim, don’t be mad wi’ me! Ain’t ye a silver-star man in the Down and Out? Ain’t I yer next friend—yer real next friend, that is—a great deal more than that young Pyn, with ’is impotent tongue, what stood up with you? Come ’ome along o’ me, and I’ll show you somethin’ good.”

It was the dark hint again.

“What are you driving at, Lovey? What is there at home?”

His reply might have been paraphrased from a writing he had never heard of.

“There’s things ahead of you, Slim, different from what you’re expectin’ of. Wait.”

I confess to being startled. You must see me as in an overwrought condition, reacting from the tremendous strain, first of fighting, then of blindness, and thirdly of emotional stress. I do not pretend that more than any other man who comes back from the jaws of the infernal brazier in Flanders I was my normal self. I was easily up and easily down, easily excited and easily impressed. The mere cast of Lovey’s two brief sentences impressed me.

“What things?” I asked, with that mixture of credulity and rejection with which one puts questions to a trance medium.

“I’ll not tell ye; I’ll show ye; only ye must come ’ome.” As if in illustration of his words, he added, “Ye must begin to wait right now.”

“But why wait?”

“Because God A’mighty can’t give us everything to oncet. Didn’t I say He told me that Hisself? We ain’t fit to receive more’n a little at a time, just like babies. That’s another tip as Beady give me. And Mr. Christian he p’inted out to me oncet that wait is one of the frequentest words in the Bible. See here! Beady writ this for me.” Fumbling in an inside pocket, he drew forth a carefully folded bit of paper, saying, as he did so: “It was one of the times when I was awful low in my mind because you was away. I don’t ’old with them low fellas at the Down and Out—not as a reg’lar thing, I don’t—but now and then when I just couldn’t seem to get along without you I’d go down to one of the meetin’s. Then oncet Beady sits beside me and begins a-kiddin’ o’ me, callin’ me old son and everything like that. But by ’n’ by he sees I wasn’t in no such humor, and we starts in to talk serious-like. And then—well, I don’t ’ardly know ’ow I come to let it out—but Beady he sees just ’ow it was with me, and he bucks me up and writes me this. He ain’t as bad as you’d think he’d be, that Beady. It’s good words out of the Bible, and there’s a reg’lar tip in ’em.”

The shaky hands unfolded the bit of foolscap on which was scrawled in a laborious script: