Chapter XII: Part 12

“Wait on the Lord; wait, I say, on the Lord.”

Beneath this counsel from one psalm were the verses from another:

“I waited patiently for the Lord; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry. He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.”

I suppose you will call my impulse by some modern psychological name, and for aught I know you may be right. But the words were not without their effect on me. They came to me with the mystery of a message emanating from the days before Time, and from spheres which have no need of the sun to rise or of the moon to give brightness or of the light of any candle. That it was carried to me by this tottering old man whom I had known in such different conditions only added to the awe.

I struggled to feet that were as shaky as Lovey’s hands, carried my little white ticket to the bookkeeper, paid for my drink, which I had left untouched, and flinging an “All right, Lovey; I’m your man!” to him, hobbled out into the lobby of the hotel.

My immediate sensation was that which you have known when the black cloud of troubles that enveloped you on waking has been instantly dispelled on your getting out of bed. The troubles may still be there; but you know your competence to live and work and deal with them.

What I felt chiefly, I think, was that the old temptation would never master me again. I had been face to face with it, and hadn’t submitted to its spell. Something had been healed in me; something had been outgrown. A simple old man with no eloquence but that of his affection had led me as another might be led by a child.

With this sense of release came a sense of energy. I was given back to my mission; my mission was given back to me. That which for lack of a more humble term I can only call the spirit of consecration took hold of me again and made me its own. The aims for which the war was being fought were my aims; I had no others. When these objectives were won my life, it seemed to me, would be over. It would melt away in that victory as dawn into sunrise. It would not be lost; it would only be absorbed—a spark in the blaze of noonday.

And as for love—well, after all, there was the moratorium of love. My lot in this respect—if it was to be my lot—would be no harder than that of millions of other men the wide world over. Love was no longer the first of a man’s considerations, not any more than the earning of a living could be the first. It might be a higher thing for her—a higher thing for me—to give it up.

Turning these things over in my mind and wondering vaguely what might be awaiting me at the apartment, I said nothing to Lovey as we trundled homeward in a taxicab; nor did Lovey say anything to me.

It was only when we got out of the lift and he had turned the key in our own door that he said, with sudden energy: “Slim, I’ll be yer servant right down to the very ground.”

“Oh no, you won’t be, Lovey,” I returned, deprecatingly. “We’re fellas together. We’re buddies. We’ll be buddies as long as we live.”

He slapped his leg with a cackle that was, as nearly as his old lungs could make it, a heartfelt, mirthful laugh.

“There! Didn’t I tell you? That’s what I’ve been a-waitin’ for; and the Lord has give it to me at last. He can’t do much more for me now—not till He takes me ’ome, like.” He raised his sharp profile and sniffed. “I smell it, Slim—a kind o’ stuffy smell it is now—but I ain’t mistook in it. And now, Slim,” he went on, triumphantly, as he threw the door open and entered before me to turn on the lights—“and now, Slim, what you’re a-waitin’ for is—is waitin’ ’ere for you.”

I knew it couldn’t be Regina that Lovey was caging in these overheated rooms, since she wouldn’t be sitting in the dark.

_CHAPTER XXVIII_

It was not Regina Barry who was waiting for me, but it was the next best thing.

Lovey stood off and pointed to it as it lay, white and oblong, on the sitting-room table.

“Give it to me with ’er own ’and,” he said, mysteriously. “Druv up to the door and asked the janitor to call me down. Told me to tell you that it wouldn’t be at ’alf past four, as she says in the note, but at five, and ’oped you wouldn’t keep ’er waitin’.”

I held it in my hand, turning it over. I felt sure of what was in it, but I didn’t know whether I was sorry or glad. Of course I should be glad from one point of view; but the points of view were so many. It would be all over now with the mission, for which my enthusiasm had so suddenly revived. When we had done this thing we should be discredited and ostracized by the people we knew best, and for some time to come.

I stood fingering the thing, feeling as I had felt now and then when we had given up a trench or a vantage-point we had been holding against odds. Wise as it might be to yield, it was, nevertheless, a pity, and only left ground that would have to be regained. There was moral strength, too, in the mere fact of holding. Not to hold any longer was a sign of weakness, however good the reason.

I broke the seal slowly, saying, as I did so, “Did she say where?”

“No, Slim; she didn’t say nowhere.”

“Only that I was not to keep her waiting.”

He thought again. “Punctual was ’er word.”

She needn’t, however, have said that. Of course I should be punctual. All might depend on my being on the spot at the moment when the clock struck. I still hesitated at drawing out the sheet. As a matter of fact I was wondering if she had received the sign she had talked about, and if so, what it was.

After all, it was an unimportant note.

DEAR FRANK,—Mother has allowed me to ask Doctor Feltring—a
lady—who retreated with the Serbian Army into Albania, to speak
at our house at half-past four to-morrow afternoon. Will you
come? We shall all be glad to see you.

Yours,

REGINA.

That was all. I should have felt a certain relief that nothing was irrevocably settled had there not been in the envelope another page. On it were written the words: “Are you trying the indirect method? If so, I think you will find it unwise.”

If I read this once I must have read it twenty times, trying to fathom its meaning.

I could only think that she was gently charging me with my apathy. The indirect method was the inactive method. I had let weeks go by not only without saying the word which she had told me she would obey, but without making any attempt to get speech with her.

And yet it seemed to me that any other woman in the world might have resented this but Regina. It was a kind of resentment unlike her. She was too proud, too intense. Even in the hypnotic state induced by the knowledge, after years of doubt, that we cared for each other, she had kept her power of resistance. She would come with me if I made her, but she hoped I wouldn’t make her. That hope made it difficult for me to impose myself on any one at once so willing and so reluctant. Of what, from different angles, each of us owed to Cantyre—not to mention any one else—she was as sensitively aware as I was.

I could hardly believe, therefore, that she was reproaching me; and yet what else did she mean?

I tried to learn that on the following day, but found access to her difficult. Since she was hostess to the speaker of the afternoon as well as to some sixty or eighty guests, mostly ladies, this was scarcely strange. I was limited, therefore, to the two or three seconds during which I was placing in her hands a cup of tea. Even then there was a subject as to which I more pressingly desired information.

“I see Stephen isn’t here.”

She couldn’t keep out of her eyes what I read as a kind of crossfire, expressive of contradictory emotions.

“He wouldn’t come.”

“Why not?”

“He didn’t like the subject.”

“Because it was medicine?”

“Because it was war.”

“But if this country goes in?”

“He doesn’t believe it will. He thinks the breaking off of our relations with Germany will do all for which we can be called on. We’ll never fight, he says. Even if we declare war he’s sure it will only be in name.”

I was not so much interested in Cantyre’s opinions as in the way in which she would take them.

“And you?”

“Oh, I think he’s only kicking against the pricks. He can’t think like that.”

I gave her a look which I tried to make significant. “You mean that he’s taking the indirect method?”

She gazed off to the other side of the room. “Oh, that isn’t the indirect method.”

“What does the indirect method involve?”

But here Mrs. Endsleigh Jarrott butted in—I have no other term for it—with a question, which she asked as if her life depended on the answer, “Regina, didn’t you think the action of that English nurse in going over the mountains with the band of little Serbian boys the most heroic thing you ever heard of?”

So I came away without having learned what it was I was doing, but not less determined to find out.

I resolved to try Cantyre. My meetings with him had become not exactly rare, but certainly infrequent. I had hardly noticed the decline of our intimacy while it was going on; I only came to a sudden realization of it when I said to myself I would look in on him that night.

It occurred to me in the first place that I had not looked in on him of my own accord since I had come home. I had gone round the elbow of the corridor once or twice when he had invited me, but never of my own initiative. Then it struck me that it was some time since he himself had come knocking at my door.

“Lovey, when was the doctor last in here?”

He was in the “kitchingette” and came to the threshold slowly. When he did so there was that scared look on his face I had seen on the previous afternoon.

“I don’t rightly know, Slim.”

“Isn’t it more than a week ago?”

He considered. “It might be.”

“Do you know any reason why he doesn’t come?”

He seemed to be defending himself against an accusation.

“Why, Slim! ’Ow sh’d I know?”

“Well, you see him every day—in and out of his room with his boots and things.”

“He don’t ’ardly ever speak to me.”

“And don’t you ever speak to him?”

He fidgeted nervously. “Oh, I passes the time o’ day, like, and tells him if his pants need pressin’ and little things like that.”

“Does he ever say anything about me?”

“Not lately he don’t.”

“Have you any idea why not?”

“I might ’ave a hidea, Slim; but what’s servants’ gossip, after all?”

As he had me there I dropped the subject, stealing round to Cantyre’s quarters about eleven that night.

To my knock, which was timid and self-conscious, he responded with a low “Come in” that lacked the heartiness to which he had accustomed me. As usual at this hour, he was in an elaborate dressing-gown, and also as usual the room was heavy with the scent of flowers. He was not lounging in an arm-chair, but sitting at his desk with his back to me, writing checks.

“Oh, it’s you!” he said, without turning his head.

“Thought I’d drop in on you.”

He went on writing. “Do you want to sit down?”

“Not if you’re busy.”

“Got some bills to pay.”

“Oh, then I’ll come another time.”

Having gone in for one bit of information, I went out with another. Cantyre knew.

I was not only sorry for his knowing, I was surprised at it. During the two months we had been in New York both Regina and I had been notably discreet. We had been discreet for the reasons that all the strings were in our own hands, and it depended solely on ourselves as to which we pulled. We alone were the responsible parties. That poor Cantyre shouldn’t have to suffer before we knew whether we meant to make him suffer or not had been a matter of concern to us both.

If he knew, it was, therefore, not from me; and neither was it from Regina. There remained Annette, but she was as safe as ourselves. Further than Annette I couldn’t think of any one.

I should have been more absorbed by this question had I not waked to new elements in the world drama, as one wakes to a sudden change in the weather. My surprise came not from any knowledge of new facts, but from the revival of my own faculty for putting two and two together. There had been a month in which depression had produced a kind of mental hibernation. When at the end of February I emerged from it the New World in particular had moved immeasurably far forward.

Now that I came to notice it, I saw a change as perceptible as that in the wind in the whole American national position. As silently as the wind shifts to a new point of the compass a hundred millions of people had shifted their point of view. They were moving it onward day by day, with a rapidity of which they themselves were unconscious.

The titanic facts were to the undercurrent of events but as the volcano to the fire at the heart of the earth. The heart of all human life being now ablaze, there was here and there a stupendous outburst which was but a symptom of the raging flame beneath. There was the U-boat blockade of Great Britain, endangering all the maritime nations of the world. There was the American diplomatic break with Germany. There was the guarding of the German ships interned in American ports. There was the torpedoing of an American steamer off the Scilly Isles. There was Mr. Wilson’s invitation to the neutral nations to join him in the breach with the German Emperor. And then on the 26th the President went in person before Congress to ask authority to use armed force to protect American rights.

These, I say, were but volcanic incidents. The impressive thing to me was the transformation of a people by a process as subtle as enchantment.

Two months earlier they had been neutral, and sitting tight on their neutrality. The war was three thousand miles away. It had been brewed in the cursed vendettas of nations of some of which the every-day American hardly knew the names. It was tragic for those peoples; but they whose lives were poisoned by no hereditary venom were not called on to take part. Zebulun and Naphtali from sheer geographical position might be obliged to hazard their lives to the death; but Asher could abide in his ports, and Gilead beyond Jordan. That had been the kind of reasoning I heard as late as the time of my arrival.

On my return to New York in November, I found a nation holding its judgments and energies in suspense. What by the end of February interested me most was the spectacle of this same people urging forward, surging upward, striving, straining toward a goal which every one knew it would take strength and sacrifice to reach.

Between this approach to war and that of any of the other great powers there was this difference: They had taken the inevitable step while in the grip of a great stress. They sprang to their arms overnight. They had no more choice than a man whose house is on fire as to whether or not he will extinguish it. Out of the bed of their luxurious existence they were called as if by conflagration. Whether they would lose their lives or escape with them was a question they had no time to consider. They went up to the top notch of the heroic in an instant, not knowing the danger they were facing or the courage they displayed.

Here, on the other hand, was a people who saw everything from a long way off. For nearly three years their souls had been sickened with the tale of blood. Gilead might abide beyond Jordan and Asher in his ports, but no atrocious detail had been spared them. They knew, therefore, just what they were doing, exactly what was before them. I can hardly say that they made their choice; they grew toward it. They grew toward it calmly, deliberately, clear-sightedly; and for this very reason with an incomparable bravery. If I were an American citizen instead of the American citizen’s blood-brother, I might not say this; I might not have been aware of it. In any family the outsider can see that which escapes the observation of the daughter or the son. I heard no born American comment on this splendid, tranquil, leisurely readjustment of the spirit to a new, herculean task; perhaps no born American noticed it; but to me as an onlooker, interested and yet detached, it was one of the most grandiose movements of an epoch in which the repetition of the grandiose bewilders the sense of proportion, as on the first days in the Selkirks or the Alps.

It was at this time I heard that Regina was addressing meetings. They were women’s club meetings, and I learned from Annette that she was speaking with success.

“She seems to have come out of a sort of trance,” Annette observed of her, using the word I had used myself. “Ever since she came home she’s been like a girl walking in her sleep. Now she’s waked and is like her old self.”

Since Annette knew my story, or part of it, I thought it no harm to ask, “To what do you attribute it?”

But Annette refused to lend herself to my game.

“I attribute it to her getting over the long strain. It’s natural that you people who’ve been over there should be dazed or jumpy or something. She’s been dazed.”

“And what do you think I’ve been?”

“Oh, you’ve been the same,” she laughed; “but then, you’re always queer.”

_CHAPTER XXIX_

The news with regard to Regina acted on me as a twofold stimulus.

In the first place, it sent me back at last to the Down and Out. If she had waked, I, too, would wake; and since she was actively pleading the great cause, I would do the same. I didn’t go to a meeting, but dropped in during a forenoon. The house was even humbler and dingier than I remembered it, but as scrupulously neat and clean. In the back sitting-room were half a dozen men, all of the type to which I had once belonged and with whom I felt a sympathy so overwhelming as to surprise myself. Perhaps because I had seen so much of what could be made of human material even when it was destined to be no more than cannon fodder in the end, I was sorry to see this waste.

With one exception I placed them as all under thirty. They were good-looking fellows in the main, who would respond amazingly to drill. After that impetus to the inner self, of which the Down and Out had the secret, plenty of work, a regular life, food, water, and sleep would renew them as the earth is renewed by spring. No missionary ever longed to bring a half-dozen promising pagans into the Christian fold more ardently than I to see these five or six poor wastrels transformed into fighting-men.

For the minute there was no official there but little Spender, whose bliss in life was in opening the Down and Out door. Having led me across the empty front sitting-room, he said, as I stood in the gap of the folding-doors:

“Say, brothers! This is Slim. Come in here four or five years ago, just as low down as any of you, and look at him now!”

I did feel enormously tall, in spite of the high studding of the room, as well as enormously big in my ample military overcoat. To the six who sat in that woeful outward idleness, of which I knew the inner secret preoccupation, I must have been an astonishing apparition. Only a very commanding presence could summon these men from the desolate land into which their spirits were wandering; but for once in my life I did it. All eyes were fixed on me; every jaw dropped in a kind of awe.

Knowing the habits and needs of such a stupor, I merely threw off my overcoat, entered, and sat down. Any greeting I made was general and offhand. Apart from that I sat and said nothing.

I sat and said nothing because I knew it was what they liked. They liked the companionship, as babies and dogs like companionship, though their aching minds could not have responded to talk. There was no embarrassment in this silence, no expectation. It was a stupefied pleasure to them to stare at the uniform, to speculate inchoately as to the patch on my eye; and that little was enough.

Nobody read; nobody smoked. I neither smoked nor read; I only sat as in a Quaker meeting, waiting for the first movement of the spirit.

It came when a husky voice, that seemed to travel from across a gulf, said, without any particular reason, “I’m Spud.”

I turned to my right, to see a good-looking, brown-eyed fellow, of perhaps twenty-eight, trying to reach me, as it were, with his pathetic, despairing gaze.

I knew what was behind this self-introduction. The lost identity was trying to find itself; the man who was worthy of something was doing his utmost to get out of the abyss by reaching up his hands to the man who had got out.

“All right, Spud,” I said, heartily. “Put it there! We’re going to be friends.”

Silence for another five minutes was broken when a high voice recited in a sort of litany, “I’m Jimmy McKeever, traveler for Grubbe & Oates, gents’ furnishers.”

Sharp-faced, wiry, catlike, agile, tough as wire, I could see this fellow creeping out into the darkness of No Man’s Land, and creeping back with information of the enemy.

I broke in on the litany to say: “Good for you, Jimmy, old boy! Glad to know you. Let’s shake hands.”

He sprang from his seat on the outskirts of the group, but before he could reach me a great, brawny paw was stretched forward by a blue-eyed young Hercules sitting nearer me, which grasped my fingers as if in a vise. There was then a scramble of handshaking, each of the bunch asserting his claim for recognition, like very small children. The older man alone held aloof, sitting by himself, scowling, hard-faced, cross-legged, kicking out a big foot with a rapid, nervous rhythm.

It was he who, when the handshaking was over, snarled out the question, “What’s the matter with your eye?”

I told them the story of how I lost it.

I told it as simply as I could, while working in a fair share of the strong color which I hoped would arrest their attention.

It did. In all my experience of men coming back into life from the state which is so expressively known as dead drunk it was the first time I ever saw them listen with avidity to any voice but that of the inner man.

What is there about war which speaks with this authority? Where did it get its power to go to the hidden man of the heart, that subliminal self with which modern speculation has been so busy, and shift him from off his age-long base? It is commonly said that, whatever our personal vicissitudes, human nature remains the same; but though that may be true of the past, I doubt if it will be true of the future. War on the scale on which we are waging it has already changed human nature. It has changed it as the years change a baby to a boy and a boy to a man. It has lifted human nature up, drawn out of it what we never supposed to be there, freed it from its slavery to time. It has to a large degree reversed the processes of time as it has reversed the usages of sex. We have seen youth doing the work of maturity, maturity that of youth, women that of men, men that of women. We have seen cowards transformed into heroes, rotters into saints, stupid, idiotic ne’er-do-wells into saviors of mankind.

We shall never go back again to the helpless conviction that youth must grow slowly into age, only to have age decay into ugliness and senility. This kind of foolish, useless progress may still go on for an indefinite time to come, but we shall work against it as against something contrary to the highest possibilities of nature. Since we have thrown off our mental shackles in great moments, we shall see that we can do the same in small, and, having emerged on a higher plane, we shall stay there. Staying there, we shall doubtless go on in time to a higher plane still—a plane on which the mighty works that are now wrought in war will become feasible in peace. We are not on that plane yet; but if the advance of the human race means anything we shall get there. It may take a thousand years; it may take more; it may take less; but in the mean time we must seize our blessings as we may.

So these fellows listened to my tale as raptly as if a trumpet were sounding in their ears. It was like a summons to them to come out of stupefaction. They asked questions not only as to my own experiences, but as to the causes and purposes of the war in general. I do not affirm that they were the most intelligent questions that could be asked; but for men in their condition they were astonishing.

That they were not of necessity to be easy converts I could see when the old chap sitting apart asked again, in his bitter voice, “Did you ever kill a fellow-creetur that had the same right to live as yourself?”

As we discussed that aspect of the subject, too, I found it difficult to restrain my audience from the free fight for which at the Down and Out there was always an inclination.

I accomplished this, however, and as I rose to go the brawny Hercules sidled shyly up to me with the words: “Say! I’m a Canuck. Peterfield, Ontario, is where I hail from. Why ain’t I in this here war?”

He was my first recruit. A few weeks later he was in uniform in Montreal. My object in telling you about him is to point out the fact that I made a beginning, and that from the beginning the sympathy of the City of Comrades upheld me. Little by little that movement by which the whole of America was being shaken out of its materialism, its provincialism, and its mental isolation reached us in Vandiver Street, and we began to see that there were subjects of conversation more commanding than that of drink. What I may call a war party rose among us, and the sentiment that we ought to be in it was expressed.

“We shall be in it when the time comes,” Andrew Christian said to me when we were alone for a few minutes after I had been talking with the men one day. “One of the great mistakes human impatience makes is in trying to hurry the methods by which the divine mind counteracts human errors. We forget that it is not for us to know the times or the seasons that the Father hath put into His own power. Things that take place in their own way generally take place in His. And the overruling force of His way, when we let it alone, working simply, naturally, and as a matter of course, is one of the extraordinary features of history.”

I was the more impressed by these quiet words for the reason that I saw that he, too, was one of the Americans chafing under the long holding back of his country. No one I had seen since my return was more changed in this respect than he. I had left a man who had but one object in his life, the salvation of other men from drink. I found a man marvelously broadened, heightened, illumined, almost transfigured by a larger set of purposes.

But he spoke so calmly!

“We shall go into this thing the more thoroughly when our people as a whole are convinced of its necessity. And for a hundred millions of people to be convinced is a matter that takes time. But even there you can see how a great purpose is changing them almost against their own will. It isn’t many months ago that they elected a President on the slogan, ‘He kept us out of war.’ Had it not been for that slogan it’s doubtful whether or not he would have been elected. All politics apart, we can say that, had he not been elected, it’s doubtful whether any other candidate could carry with him a united Congress when we come to the moment of decision. Were the President not to have a united Congress, behind him, there would be no united people. As it is we’re all forging forward together, President, Congress, and people, as surely as winter forges forward into spring; and when the minute arrives—”

He broke off with a smile I can only call exalted. With a hasty pressure of my hand he was off to some other fellow with some other needful word.

_CHAPTER XXX_

My purpose in telling you all this is to show you why I reacted so slightly to Regina’s charge of the indirect method. Though my curiosity as to what she meant was keen enough, the pressure of other interests allowed it no time to work. This is to say, as soon as I got back into the current of great events personal concerns became relatively unimportant. They had to wait. One developed the capacity to keep them waiting.

But toward the middle of March I met her one day in Fifth Avenue. Even from a distance I could see that her step was vigor and her look animation. The haunting sadness had fled from her eyes, while the generous smile, spontaneous and flashing, had returned to her scarlet lips. It was a new Regina because it was the old one.

To me her first exclamation was: “How well you look! You’re almost as you were before the war.”

Though I was conscious of a pang at seeing her so far from pining away, I endeavored to play up.

“Mayn’t I say the same of you? What’s done it?”

She laughed. “Oh, I don’t know. Work, I suppose—and the knowledge that things are marching.”

“I hear you’re very busy.”

“I hear you’re busy, too.”

“People do seem to want to be told things at first hand.”

“I find the same.”

“And so one has to be on the job.”

“There’s nothing like it, is there? It”—she flung me one of her old, quick, daring glances—“it fills all the needs. Nothing else becomes urgent.”

“You mean that one’s personal affairs—”

“Oh, one has no personal affairs. I remember a man who was in the San Francisco earthquake telling me that for forty-eight hours he hardly needed to eat or sleep.”

“I’ve seen that doubled and trebled.”

“Of course you have. It simply means that when we get out of ourselves we can make supermen of the commonest material.”

I ventured to say: “You look happy, Regina. Are you?”

“Are you?”

I weighed this in order to answer her truthfully.

“If I’m not happy I’m—I’m content—content to be doing something—the least little bit—to urge things forward.”

“And I can say the same. If I look well, as you put it, that’s the reason. And so long as that’s the reason other things can—wait.” She added, quickly: “I must go now or I shall be late. I’m speaking to the women at the Mary Chilton Club, and I’m overdue.”

She had actually passed on when I stopped her to say, “What do you mean by the indirect method?”

She called back over her shoulder, “Ask Stephen.”

And I asked him that night. Having heard him come into his room between eight and nine o’clock, I marched in boldly, bearding him without beating about the bush.

“I say, old Stephen, what have you been saying to Regina about me?”

His hat had been thrown on the table; his arms were outstretched in the act of taking off his overcoat.

He repeated my question as if he didn’t understand it.

“What have I been saying to Regina about you? Why, nothing—much.”

“Nothing much; that means something. What the deuce do you mean by the indirect method?”

“I haven’t spoken of an indirect method.”

“No; but she has!”

“Oh, I see.”

“Then if you see, tell me what it is.”

He finished the arrested act of taking off his coat, after which he hung it up in a closet, doing the same with his hat. The minute’s delay allowed time for the storm-clouds to gather on his face, and all the passions of a gloomy-hearted nature to concentrate in a hot, thundery silence.

“Is this a bit of bluff, Frank?”

“Bluff be hanged! I’m ready to speak out frankly.”

The storm-clouds were torn with a flash like a streak of lightning.

“Then why didn’t you come to me like a man instead of sending that sneaking old beast—”

“Hold on, Stephen. What sneaking old beast have I sent?”

“He wouldn’t have come unless you had set him on me. You needn’t tell me that.”

“What the deuce are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about. There hasn’t been a day since you came back that I haven’t had a hint.” He was not a man to whom anger came easily; he began to choke, to strangle with the effort to get his indignation out. “I’d have given him the toe of my boot long ago if—if—if—if”—the words positively shivered on his lips—“if—if—if I hadn’t wanted to see how far you’d go; and, by God! I’ve—I’ve had enough of it!”

“Enough of what, Stephen?” I endeavored to ask, quietly.

He knocked his knuckles on the table with a force that almost made them bleed.

“My name is Cantyre—do you understand?”

“Yes, I understand. But tell me, what is it you’ve had enough of?”

“I’ve had enough of your damned diplomatic slyness in setting that old reptile on me!”

I am not quick tempered. The tolerance born of a too painful knowledge of my own shortcomings obliges me to be slow to wrath. But when anger does get hold of me it works a change like that of a powerful chemical agent suddenly infused into the blood.

I turned and strode out. A few times in the trenches I had been the victim of this rage to kill—and I had killed. How many I killed at one time or another I now couldn’t tell you. I saw too red to keep the count. All I know is that I have stuck my bayonet into heart after heart, and have dashed out brains with the butt end of my rifle. It is all red before me still—a great splash of blood on the memory.

But I had got the habit. In a rage like this to kill some one had become an instinct. I could not have believed that the impulse would have pursued me into civil life; but there it was.

Having flung open the door of my apartment, I marched straight for the “kitchingette.” Lovey was seated on a stool beside the tiny gas-range, polishing one of my boots. The boot was like a boxing-glove on his left hand, while he held the brush suspended in his right, looking up at me with the piteous appeal of a rabbit pleading for its life.

His weakness held me back from striking him, but it didn’t stem my words.

“Who the devil, you old snake, gave you the right to interfere in my affairs?”

He simply looked up at me, the boot on one hand, the brush suspended in the other. His lower lip trembled—his arms began to tremble—but he made no attempt to defend himself.

“What have you been saying?” I demanded. “Speak, can’t you?”

But he couldn’t. I caught him by the collar and dragged him to his feet.

He had just the strength to stand on them, though his limp hands continued to hold the boot and the brush.

“Now are you going to speak? Or shall I kick you out?”

“You’d kick me out, Slim?”

The mildness of his voice maddened me.

“By God, I would!”

The brush and the boot fell with a dull clatter to the floor.

“Then I’d better go.”

He looked about him helplessly till his eyes fell on the old felt hat hanging on a peg. I watched him as he took it down and crammed it on his head. There was another helpless searching as if he didn’t know what he was looking for before he spied an old gnarled stick in a corner. Taking that in his hand, he fumbled his way into the living-room.

By the time I had followed him I was beginning to relent. I had not really meant to have him go, but I was not ready as yet to call him back. What Cantyre must have thought of me, what Regina must have thought of me, in egging so poor a creature on to say what I wouldn’t say myself, roused me as to a more intense degree I used to be roused on hearing of Belgian women treated with the last indignities, and Canadian soldiers crucified. Had I stopped to consider I would have seen that Regina didn’t believe it, and that Cantyre believed it only as far as it gave an outlet to his complicated inward sufferings; but I didn’t stop to consider. Perhaps I, too, was seeking an outlet for something repressed. At any rate, I let the poor old fellow go.

“What about your things?” I asked, before he had reached the door.

He turned with a certain dignity. “I sha’n’t want no things.” He added, however, “Ye do mean me to get out, Slim?”

I didn’t—but I didn’t want to tell him so. Fury had cooled down without leaving me ready to retract what I had said. I meant to go after him—when he had got as far as the lift—but I meant, too, that he should take those few bleeding steps of anguish.

He took them—not to the lift, but out into the vestibule. Then I heard a faint moan; then a sound as if something broke; and then a soft tumbling to the floor.

When I got out he was lying all in a little huddled, senseless heap, with a cut on his forehead where he had struck the key or the door-knob as he fell.

It was more than an hour before Cantyre got him back to consciousness; but it was early morning before he spoke. We had stayed with him through the night, as he had shown all the signs of passing out. His recovery of speech somewhere about dawn came as a surprise to us.

To Cantyre I had given but the slightest explanation of the accident, being sure, however, that he guessed at what I didn’t say.

“Told him to get to the dickens out of this, and he was taking me at my word. Never meant to let him get farther than the lift. Just wanted to scare him. Sorry now.”

But Lovey’s account was different.

About seven in the morning there came a streak of wan light down the shaft into which the window of his room looked out. Cantyre murmured something about going back to his own place for a bath.

“All right,” I agreed, “and you’d better get your breakfast. When you come back I can do the same. You will come back, won’t you?”

“Oh, of course! I sha’n’t be gone more than an hour. When he wakes again give him another teaspoonful of this; but don’t worry him unless he wakes.”

And just then Lovey woke. He woke with a dim smile, as a young child wakes. He smiled at Cantyre first, and then, rolling his soft blue eyes to the other side of the bed, he smiled at me.

“What’s up, Slim?” he asked, feebly. “I ain’t sick, am I?”

“No, Lovey, old son, you’re not sick; you’ve only had a bit of a fall.”

And then it came back to him.

“Oh yes. I know. Served me right, didn’t it?” Rolling his eyes now toward Cantyre, he continued: “I was just a-frightenin’ of Slim, like. Kind o’ foolish, I was. Said I was goin’ to leave him. Didn’t mean to go no farther nor the lift.”

“I didn’t mean to let you go, Lovey,” I groaned, humbly.

“Of course you didn’t! ’Ow ’uld ye get along without me, I’d like to know? Didn’t I keep ye straight all them weeks at the Down and Out?”

“You did, Lovey.”

“And ’aven’t I saved ye lots o’ times since?”

“You have, old man.”

“I wouldn’t leave ye, not for nothink, Slim. We’re buddies as long as we live, ain’t we? Didn’t ye say that to me yerself?”

“I did, and I’ll say it again.”

“Well then, what’s the use o’ talkin’? You mustn’t mind me, sonny. I may get into a bad temper and speak ’arsh to you; but I don’t mean nothink by it. I wouldn’t leave ye, not for—”

The voice trailed away, and presently he was asleep or unconscious again, I couldn’t be sure which.

Neither could I be sure whether he believed this version of the tale or whether he concocted it to comfort me. At any rate, it served its purpose in that it eased the situation outwardly, enabling Cantyre and me to face each other without too much self-consciousness.

As a matter of fact, self-consciousness had hardly embarrassed us through the night. There had been too much to think about and to do. The minute I had got Lovey into the living-room and on the couch I had run for Cantyre, and he had run back with me. In the stress of watching the old man’s struggle between life and death we felt toward our personal relations what one feels of an exciting play after returning to realities. We were back on the old terms; we called each other Stephen and Frank. Only now and then, when for a half-hour there was nothing to do but to sit by the bed and watch, did our minds revert to the actual between us.

That is, mine reverted to it, and I suppose his did the same. How he thought of it I cannot tell you; but to me it seemed infinitely trifling. Here was a dying man whose half-lighted spirit was standing on the threshold of a fully lighted world. One might have said that the radiance of the life on which he was entering already shone in the tenderness that began to dawn in the delicate old face. It was a face growing younger, as for two or three years it had grown more spiritual. I saw that now and did justice to it as something big. It was on the level of big things; and love-affairs between men and women were only on the level of the small.

And all over the world big things of the same sort were taking place, some in the sharp flash of an instant, and some as the slow result of years. I had seen so much of it with my own eyes that I could call up vision after vision as I sat alone in the gray morning, watching the soft, sweet pall settle on the old man’s countenance, while Cantyre took his bath.

Queerly, out of the unrecorded, or out of what I didn’t suppose I had recorded, there flashed a succession of pictures, all of them of the big, the splendid, the worth while. They came inconsequently, without connection with each other, without connection that I could see with the moment I was living through, beyond the fact that they were all on the scale of the big.

There was the recollection of a khaki-clad figure lying face downward on a hillside. I approached him from below, catching sight first of the soles of the huge boots on which he would never walk again. Coming nearer, I saw his arms outstretched above his head and his nails dug into the earth. He was bleeding from the ears. But when I bent over him to see if he was still alive he said, almost roughly:

“Leave me alone! I can get along all right. Jephson’s over there.”

I left him alone because there was nothing I could do for him, but when I went to Jephson he was lying on his back, his knees drawn up, and his face twisted into the strangest, most agonized, most heavenly and ecstatic smile you can imagine on a human face.

Then there was a young fellow running at the head of his platoon, a slim young fellow with flaxen hair and a face like a bright angel’s, who had been a crack sprinter at McGill. He was long after my time, of course; but I had known his family, and since being in the neighborhood of Ypres I had seen him from time to time. He was not made for a soldier, but a brave young soldier he had become, surmounting fear, repulsion, and all that was hideous to a sensitive soul like his, and establishing those relations with his men that are dearer in many ways than ties of blood. The picture I retain, and which came back to me now, is of his running while his men followed him. It was so common a sight that I would hardly have watched it if it had been any one but him. And then, for no reason evident to me, just as if it was part of the order of the day, he threw up his arms, tottered on a few steps, and went tumbling in the mud, face downward.

With the rapidity of a cinema the scene changed to something else I had witnessed. It was the day I got my dose of shrapnel in the foot. Lying near me was a colonel named Blenkins. Farther off there lay a sergeant in his regiment named Day. Day had for Blenkins the kind of admiration that often exists between man and officer for which there is no other name than worship. Slowly, painfully, dying, the non-com. dragged himself over the scarred ground and laid his head on the dying colonel’s heart. Painfully, slowly, the dying colonel’s hand stole across the dying non-com.’s breast; and in this embrace they slept.

Other memories of the same sort came back to me, disconnected, having no reference to Lovey, or Cantyre, or Regina, or the present, beyond the fact that they came out of the great life of which comradeship was a token and the watchwords rang with generosity.

It was the world of the moment. Such things as I had been recalling had happened that very night; they had happened that very morning; they would happen through that day, and through the next day and the next—till their purpose was accomplished. What that purpose was to be—But that I was to learn a little later.

That is to say, a little later I got a light on the outlook which has been sufficient for me to walk by; but of it I will tell you when the time comes.

For in the mean time the tide was rising. As Lovey lay smiling himself into heaven the national spirit was mounting and mounting, quietly, tensely, with excitement held in leash till the day of the Lord was very near at hand.

All through March events had developed rapidly. On the first day of that month the government had revealed Germany’s attempt to stir up Mexico and Japan against the United States. A few days later Germany herself had admitted the instigation. A few days later still Austria had given her approval to unlimited submarine warfare. A few days later still Nicholas was deposed in Petrograd. The country was marching; the world was marching; the heart was marching. It was difficult for the mind to keep up with the immensity of such happenings or to appraise them at their value. I do not assert that I so appraised them; I only beg you to understand that what I wanted and Cantyre wanted and Regina wanted, each of us for himself and herself, became curiously insignificant.

Not that we were working with the same ends in view. By no means! Cantyre was still opposed to war as war, and bitterly opposed to war if it involved the United States. That he was kicking against the pricks, as Regina asserted, I couldn’t see; but that he was feeling the whole situation intensely was quite evident.

The result, however, was the same when it came to balancing personal interests against the public weal. The public weal might mean one thing to him and another thing to me, but to us both it overrode private resentment. There was a moratorium of resentment. We might revive it again; but for the moment it vanished out of sight.

_CHAPTER XXXI_

So we came to that determining moment when we held our famous patriotic meeting at the Down and Out.

I call it famous because it was a new point of departure. In all the club’s history there had never been a meeting for any other purpose than to screw the courage up to the cutting out of drink. Other subjects had been suggested from time to time; but we had stuck to our last as specialists. We had not been turned aside for philanthropy, for education, for financial benefit, or even for religion in the commonly accepted meaning of that word; and the results had been our justification. But now the flame at the heart of the earth had caught us, and we were all afire.

I mean that we were afire with interest, though the interest was against war as well as for it. But for it or against it, it was the one theme of our discussion; and with cause.

The tide was rising higher, and the spirit of the nation floating on the top. On one of the first days of April the President had asked Congress to declare a state of war with the German Empire. Two days later the Senate voted that declaration. A few nights after that we got together to talk things over at the Down and Out.

It was a crowded meeting, but as you looked round you in advance you would have prophesised a dull one. Our fellows came from all over New York and the suburbs, washed up, brushed up, and in their Sunday clothes. A few were men of education, but mostly we were of the type generally classed as hard-working. In age we ran from the seventies down to the twenties, with a preponderance of chaps between twenty-five and forty.

What I gathered from remarks before the meeting came to order was a dogged submission to leadership.

“If you was to put it up to us guys to decide the whole thing by ourselves,” Beady Lamont said to me as we stood together, “we’d vote ag’in’ it. Why? Because we’re over here—mindin’ our own business—with our kids to take care of—and our business to keep up—and we ain’t got no call to interfere in what’s no concern of ours. Them fellows over in Europe never could keep still, and they dunno how. But”—he made one of his oratorical gestures with his big left hand—“but if the President says the word—well, we’re behind him. He’s the country, and when the country speaks there’s no Amur’can who ain’t ready to give all.”

Perhaps he had said something similar to Andrew Christian, because it was that point of being ready to give all which, when he spoke, Christian took as his text.