Chapter IX: Part 9

I should probably not have interfered with it had the circumstances not raised us above the sphere of our ordinary interests. The roar of the wind, the tumult of the sea, the plunging of the ship, the indescribable whining of shells, the knowledge of danger—were as the orchestra which lifts the duet to emotional planes that dialogue alone could never attain to. Though our words might be commonplace, every syllable was charged with tones and overtones and undertones of meaning to be seized by something more subtle than intelligence. Prudence might have said, “Let everything alone,” but that urging of the being which escapes the leash of prudence drove me on to speak.

“Do you remember when I talked to you last?”

She answered with the detachment of a witness under compulsion to tell the truth. The personal was as far as possible eliminated from her voice.

“Perfectly.”

“We—we seemed to—to break off in the middle of a conversation.”

“Which you never gave me any further opportunity of going on with.”

The statement took my breath away. For some seconds I could only stare at her as a truthful man stares when he hears himself given the lie direct.

“Did you—did you—want to go on with it?” I managed to stammer at last.

“What do you think?”

“I—I didn’t think that. I waited nearly two hours.”

“And if you’d only waited a few minutes more—”

I leaned down toward her, breaking in on her words with a sense of what I might have lost: “Everything would have been different? You were going to say that?”

She took time to raise her hands and adjust the yashmak, giving me the clue to her reason for wearing it. It was putting on a vizor before going into battle. Knowing that she would be thrown into some difficult situations, she had taken this method of being as far as possible screened against embarrassment.

She was successful in that. Apart from the shifting surface fire of her eyes and the slightest possible tremor in her voice I saw no rift in the barricade of her composure.

“No; that isn’t what I was going to say. I don’t know how things would have been. I suppose they would have been as—as they are now.”

“But we could have talked them over.”

“If you’d waited.”

“I should have waited forever if I’d known.”

“Or if,” she went on, with the same serenity, “you hadn’t disappeared next day without leaving an address. I tried to find you—as well as I could, that is—without seeming to hunt you down.”

I explained that when I left New York on that last Monday in June, 1914, I had not expected to be gone for more than a few weeks—just the time to recover from the first effects of the blow I thought her scorn had dealt to me.

“It was curious, though,” I went on, “that that name, Gavrilo Prinzip, should have hammered itself in on my brain. I recall it now as about the only thing I could think of. I didn’t know what it meant, and I was far from supposing it the touchstone of human destinies that it afterward proved to be; but in some unreasoning way it held me. It was like the meaningless catch of a tune with which you can’t go on, till all at once you see it finishes in—”

“In a trumpet-call. Yes, I know. You had to follow it. So had I. I don’t think there’s much more than that to be said.”

The blue-gray streak was again on the starboard side, but comfortingly far astern. Though we were still within her range, we were getting the benefit of distance. At the same time some one called our attention to a blotch of black smoke, far down on the eastern horizon. A destroyer was coming to our aid.

I went back to the point we had partially forsaken.

“How long did you expect me to wait that afternoon?”

She looked down at the deck, answering with a perceptible infusion of the bitter in her tone.

“I didn’t fix a time. I wasn’t sitting with my watch in my hand.”

“But I was.”

“Evidently.”

“Why didn’t you come down?”

“I came down as soon as I could.”

“What kept you?”

She raised her eyes for a fleeting glance—lowering them again. At the same time her voice sank, too, so that in the fury of sound about us she was no more than audible.

“The thing you told me.”

“And that kept you—in what way?”

“In the way of making everything—different.”

“How much does that mean—different?”

“It means a good deal.”

“Can’t you tell me exactly?”

“I can’t tell you exactly; but it was something like this.” She fixed her eyes on me steadily. “When they first opened the Subway in New York I came up out of a station one winter afternoon just as the lights were lit, and instead of going to the right, as I should have done, I turned to the left. When I had walked about fifteen minutes I was dazed. Though I was in a part of New York I knew perfectly well, I couldn’t recognize anything. It was all a confusion of lights. I couldn’t tell which of the streets ran north and south, or which were east and west, or what the buildings were that I’d been used to seeing all my life. In the end some one took me into a drug-store and made me sit down till I had time to reorientate myself.”

“But you did it in the end?”

“That time—yes.”

“And this time? The time we’re talking about?”

Whir-r-r! Z-z-z! P-ff!

Bang!

Whir-r-r! Z-z-z! P-ff!

Bang!

From the port side there came something like a feeble cheer—a chorus of rough male voices and high female screams, timid and yet glad.

A new swing of our crazed leviathan disclosed the reason for this wavering, victorious cry. There were two more blobs of smoke on the horizon, and from different points on the Irish coast three huge birds were flying like messengers from some god. Moreover, the blob of smoke we had first seen now had a considerable stretch of the ocean behind her, and in front a parting of the spray like two white plumes as she tore in our direction.

“She sure is some little ripper!” came a dry Yankee voice in the group about life-boat No. 5.

“Thirty-five knots if it’s one.”

“Them ’planes’ll overtake her, though, and be on the spot as soon as she is.”

“Gosh! I’d like to see Fritzie then!”

“J’ever see a kingfisher sweep down on a gudgeon?”

“Gee-whiz! Look at Fritzie! Goin’ to submerge!”

And sure enough, as we stared, the blue-gray streak began to sink behind the waves, becoming to the imagination even more a giant deep-sea reptile after it had gone.

Almost simultaneously our leviathan calmed down, resuming her straight course. It was done apparently with the wordless, unexplained inconsequence with which a runaway horse will suddenly fall into a peaceful trot. There was no stopping to salute the destroyers and ’planes that were hastening to our help or to exchange confidences with them as to our common enemy. There was neither hail nor farewell as we forged again toward the open sea.

Danger being considered past, the groups broke up, intermingling with sighs of relief. The Consolatrice and her friend came to exchange a few words with us, and Miss Prynne returned from the boat to which she had good-naturedly exchanged. While I thanked her for this kindness, as if it had been done for myself, I saw Miss Barry trying to slip off.

By stepping out of my corner and assuming a limp lamer than my actual disability warranted I was able to intercept her.

“I wonder,” I made bold to ask, “if you could give me a hand back to the music-room?”

The yashmak was not so impervious but that I could detect behind it the scarlet glimmer of her smile.

“Oh, I think you could get there by yourself. Try.”

“I can manage the deck,” I said, in the tones of a boy feigning an indisposition to stay away from school, “but I’m afraid of the steps of the companionway.”

“How would you have managed if I hadn’t been here?” she asked, as she allowed me to lean ever so lightly on her arm.

The steps of the companionway presenting a more real difficulty than I had expected, I could say nothing till with her aid I had lowered myself safely down.

Postponing the pleasure of thanking her, I reverted to the topic the last attack had interrupted.

“I want to hear about your reorientation. You were able to put the streets in their proper place again, and to see New York as it was; but in my case—”

She put out her hand with that air which there is no gainsaying.

“I’m rather tired. I think I must go to my cabin and have a rest.” She added, however, not very coherently: “The way things happen is in general the best way—if we know how to use it.”

Somewhat desperately, because of her determination to go, I burst out, “And do you think all this has been the best way?”

“You must see for yourself that it’s been a very good way. We’ve been able to do—to do the things we’ve both done.” But the admission in the use of the first personal plural pronoun seemed suddenly to alarm her. She took refuge again in her need of rest. “I really must be off. If we don’t meet again before we leave the boat—”

“Oh, but we shall!”

“I’m very often confined to my cabin.”

“Not when you want to be out of it.”

“Very well, then; I very often don’t leave my cabin.”

I was holding the hand she had extended to say good-by, but she slipped it away and was going.

“Then tell me this—just this,” I begged. “How is it that we’re both on the same ship? That didn’t happen by accident?”

Whether she refused to answer my question or whether it didn’t reach her I couldn’t tell. All I got in response was a long, oblique regard—the fleeing farewell look of Beatrice Cenci—as she carried her secrets and mysteries away with her.

_CHAPTER XXI_

So my celibacy of the will was threatened. I mean by that that I found myself with two main objects of thought instead of one. Having vowed myself to a cause, a woman had supervened with that pervasiveness of presence with which a perfume fills a room. I might still vow myself to the cause, but I shouldn’t serve it as I had meant to, with heart and senses free.

Or should I?

The question fundamentally was that. Could I at a time like this divide my allegiance as I should be obliged to divide it by falling in love and being married? Or ought I, in deference to the work I was to do, suppress this old passion and smother the problems and curiosities it had begun to rouse in me?

If, in view of the many men who have been good soldiers and equally good husbands, this hesitation seems far-fetched to you, I must beg you to remember what I have told you already, that my mission, such as it was, had become my life. For this the inspiration sprang from what I had seen for myself. What I had seen for myself compelled me to believe that the world was divided into just two camps—those who fought the Germans and those who did not. “He that is not with me is against me,” I was prepared to say; except that for the small bordering nations, whom the arch-enemy could have crushed as he had crushed Belgium and Serbia before any one else could save them, I was ready to make long allowances. I couldn’t make these allowances for the United States; and to win the friends I valued so highly to joining in the task that seemed to me the most pressing before mankind was the work to which I longed to give myself every minute of the day.

No consecrated soldier of a holy war had ever been moved by a purer singleness of purpose than I when I came on board the _Assiniboia_; and now I was already thinking most of something else. As violently—I choose the adverb—as if I had never seen this woman’s image grow fainter and fainter in my memory I craved to know certain things about her.

I might state those things in this way: Why, in the summer in which I joined the army and went across with the first Canadian contingent, did she seek the acquaintance of my sister Evelyn and undertake nursing in her company? Why did she join my sister Mabel and steal in and out of my room when I was blind? Why, since I was blind, did she keep her presence unknown to me and swear my sisters to secrecy? Why was she coming back on board this boat? Did she really care for me? And if she really cared for me, why this air of ever so courteous, ever so gentle constraint the minute we were alone and I broached any subject that was personal?

Was she angry? Was she contrite? Was she wounded? Was she scornful? Was she proud? Or was she simply subjecting me to one more test, which might end again in her being disappointed?

I have to confess that these inquiries already absorbed my soul in such a way that I forgot that on which I had been accustomed to meditate every hour of my time—the approach I was to make to American citizens like Beady Lamont and Ralph Coningsby. Against this weaning away of my heart some essential loyalty cried, “Treason!” I was the man who had put his hand to the plow and was looking back. If I continued to look back I might easily prove unfit for the kingdom of heaven as I conceived of it.

Throughout the next day I was eager to test the effect of these counter-inclinations on myself. That I could only do by meeting her. If I met her, would she be to me simply what the Consolatrice was to a more intimate degree? Or should I find her the brave, aspiring, provocative spirit that had led me up the path that had begun to mount from the moment when I first saw her—only in the end to let me fall over the edge of a precipice? I wanted to see; I wanted to be sure.

But she kept me waiting. She didn’t appear that day. It was a fine day for the ocean in November, with a tolerably smooth sea. It was not weather, therefore, that confined her to her cabin; it was something else. She knew I would be on the watch for her, and she let me have my labor for my pains.

It was the kind of advance and recession with which I had least patience. On Thursday morning I kept no watch for her. Swearing that she meant no more to me than Miss Prynne and that my work in life was too serious to allow any woman to interfere with it, I gave myself to the reading of books on the war situation as it affected America. If she was playing a game, she would learn that it was not one of solitaire. Two could take a hand at it, and with equal skill. I prided myself on that skill when sometime in the latter part of Thursday afternoon she passed my chair in the music-room—the sixth sense told me it was she—and I did not look up from Sheering’s Oxford lectures on “The War and World Repentance.”

Though my eye followed the passage, I got little or no sense from it.

“Human effort after human welfare is never drastic enough,” I read. “It is never sufficiently radical to accomplish the purpose it tries to carry out. Instead of laying its ax at the root of the tree of its ills it is content to hack off a few branches. It never gets beyond pruning-work; and the most one can say of the results it achieves is that they are better than nothing.

“So much, then, one can affirm of the dreams that are now being dreamed, in all probability to vanish with waking. They are better than nothing. Better than nothing are the aims held up before the Allied nations as the citadels they are to capture. The crushing of military despotism is better than nothing; the elimination of war is better than nothing; the establishment of universal democracy, the founding of a league of nations, the formation of a league to enforce peace, the dissemination of a world-wide entente, these are all of them better than nothing, even though they end in being no more productive of permanent blessing than the Hague Conference, which was better than nothing in itself. They are probably as effective as anything that man, with his reason, his wisdom, his science, his degree of self-control, and his pathetic persistence in believing in himself when that belief has so unfailingly been blasted, can ever attain to. But, oh, gentlemen, as the prophet said thirty centuries ago, ‘This is not the way, neither is this the city.’ You are pouring out blood; you are pouring out money; you are giving your sons and your daughters to pass through the fire to Moloch; through the fire to Moloch unflinchingly they pass; you are tearing the hearts out of your own bodies, and you are doing it with a heroism that cannot fail of some reward. But this is not the way, neither is this the city. It is better than nothing, but it is not the best. You could do it all so much more thoroughly, so much more easily. You will accomplish something; there is no question about that; but till you take the right way, and attack the city of which you must become masters, that great good thing for which you are fighting will still be a vision of the future.”

But with the knowledge that this woman had simply passed and let her shadow fall upon me I had no heart for Sheering’s impassioned words. I got up and followed her.

I found her on deck, far forward, leaning on the rail and watching a fiery, angry sunset that inflamed all the western horizon. As she looked round and saw me advancing along the deck I detected in her telltale eyes the first scared impulse to run away.

But what was she afraid of?

It was the question I asked as soon as I was near enough to speak.

“What makes you think I’m afraid of anything?”

“The way you looked. You see, this queer sort of veil doesn’t protect you; it gives you away by throwing all your expression into your eyes. There’s an essence that eludes one till it’s concentrated and distilled.”

“I’m sure I didn’t mean—”

“To look like an animal trying to escape? Well, you did.”

“Oh, as to that, I could easily have walked round the deck-house to the other side of the ship.”

“If the discourtesy wouldn’t have been too obvious—of course!” But I didn’t press the point. There were other admissions to which I had an unchivalrous craving to bring her if I could; and so I went on, artfully, “It was clever of you to find my state-room on Tuesday—all on the spur of the moment like that.”

She contented herself with murmuring, “Yes, wasn’t it?”

“And your own cabin is on another deck.”

“I’m on this deck.”

“So that you hadn’t even seen me going in and out.”

“I’m a nurse—in a way. Nurses have to know more than other passengers or they’d be no good on board ship.”

“And do you know every one’s cabin?”

“I know every one’s cabin to whom I can be useful.”

“Is that many?”

“No; not many, unfortunately.” She diverted the attack by saying, “What are you asking for?”

“Oh, for nothing,” I answered, carelessly. I added, however, with some slight show of intention, “I’ve called it your cleverness, but I really mean it as your kindness.”

She decided to take the bull by the horns, shifting her position and standing with her back to the rail.

“If you call it kindness that I should have learned the number and location of your cabin before we left Liverpool—”

“Oh, you did it then?”

“Yes, I did it then. But if you call it kindness, of course I can’t prevent you. I can only assure you it isn’t. I knew you couldn’t get about easily—”

“How did you know that?”

“I saw you come on board. Wasn’t that enough?”

“Then let me go farther back and ask how you happened to see me come on board. Wasn’t it an extraordinary coincidence that you should have been there, right at the head of the gangway?”

“Well, life is full of extraordinary coincidences, isn’t it? And when a woman who can do so little sees a wounded man—”

There were other wounded men scattered about the deck. I glanced at them as I said, “And have you done that for all the wounded men on board?”

“I’ve done it for all I know.”

“And how many do you know?”

She averted her profile, with an air of having had enough of the subject.

“I wanted you to tell me a minute ago why you were asking me these questions, and you said for nothing.” I could see her smile behind the chiffon of the yashmak as she went on, “Since that’s your only reason, perhaps you won’t mind if I don’t answer you.”

“But if I had a reason for asking, would you tell me then?”

“Wouldn’t it have to depend on the reason?”

“You’re very careful.”

She shot a daring, smiling glance at me as she riposted, “Well, aren’t you?” Before I had time to recover from the slight shock that these words dealt me she pointed to the horizon. “See, there’s smoke over there. I do hope it’s not another U-boat.”

I accepted the diversion—for more reasons than one. Of these the first was the shock to which I have alluded. She saw through me. That is, she saw I didn’t place her first. How she saw it I could no more tell than she could tell how I knew her history of the past two years. But the tables were turned and turned in such a way as to make me feel ridiculous. A man who is careful with regard to a woman is always slightly grotesque.

As my most skilful defense lay in feigning a lack of perception I talked about U-boats and the experience of two days before; but I came away from her with a feeling of discomfort.

I analyzed the feeling of discomfort as due to the repetition of our mutual attitude more than two years previously. Where she came forward I drew back. I had always drawn back. I used to suppose that nothing but one motive could have driven me to this humiliating course, and now I was taking it from another. I was taking it from another, and she knew it. The essence of the humiliation lay in that.

Each time I met her on deck she betrayed a hesitation that I found harder to bear than contempt. Her very effort to preserve a tone of friendliness was a reproach to me. It seemed to say: “You see all I’ve done for you. You accept it and give me nothing in return.”

And yet I was obliged to consider that which, were I to let myself be nothing but myself, might lie before me in the next few weeks and months. I should arrive in New York as a man engaged to be married. As a man engaged to be married I should be at once enveloped in that silken net of formalities with which women with their consecration to the future of the race have invested all that pertains to the preliminaries of mating. I had seen for myself that in America that silken net is more elaborate than it is elsewhere. In any British community it is spun of tissue, fragile, light, easily swept aside should the need arise. In America it is solidly constructed of gold cord, and is as often as not adorned with gems. In America an engagement leads to something of an anti-climax in that, from the human point of view, it is more important than a marriage. It is sung by a chorus of matrons and maidens and social correspondents of the press in a volume far more resounding than that of the nuptial hymn. That a man should marry after he has become engaged is considered as much a matter of course as that he should fight after he has enlisted; but that he should become engaged is like taking that first oath which denotes his willingness to give himself up, to make the great renunciation for the sake of something else. More than any single or signal act of bravery that comes later, it is the thing that counts. I am not quarreling with American social custom; I am only saying that I had reasons for being afraid of it.

I should arrive in New York as a man engaged to be married, and as a man engaged to be married I should be put through paces as strict and as stately as those of the minuet. There would be no escape from it. I might be promised in advance an escape from it, but the promise would not be kept. I might be promised simplicity, privacy, secrecy, a mere process of handfasting before the least noticeable of legal authorities; but all would go by the board.

Whatever my future wife and I might say—and my future wife would say it only half-heartedly, if as earnestly as that—I should be seized in the soft, tender, irresistible embrace of the feminine in American life, the element that is far more powerful than any other, and I should have no more fight to put up than a new-born infant against a nurse. There would be a whole array of mothers and potential mothers to see that I had not. There would be Mrs. Barry and Annette van Elstine and Hilda Grace and Esther Coningsby and Elsie Coningsby and Mrs. Legrand, not to speak of a vast social army behind them, all supported and urged on by the unanimous power of the press.

No one of them would allow me to slip from their kindly, overwhelming attentions any more than bees would allow a queen. Like a queen bee is any man who is engaged to an American girl—or at least he was in the days, now so extraordinarily long ago, before America went into the war. Since then marriage has become casual, incidental, one of those hasty touches given to human life, which, like the possession of money or the pursuit of happiness or the leisure to earn a living, are pleasant but not vital. But in the America of the end of 1916, the mentally far-away America to which I was going back, matrimony was the most momentous happening in a life history. From the minute a man became engaged to that when he turned away from the altar, he had to give himself up to his condition. He was no longer his own. Dinners, lunches, parties, theaters, publicity, and the approval of women claimed him; and shrinking was of no avail.

To the life after marriage, from this point of view, my mind hardly worked forward. I have spoken of men who were good soldiers and equally good husbands. Undoubtedly there are hundreds of thousands in the class. But I had seen not a little of men who, because they were husbands, would gladly not have been soldiers at all. Theirs was not a divided allegiance, for they had only one. The body was in the fight, and it did wondrously; but the heart and soul and mind and craving were with the wife and little ones; and who could blame them?

But all my personal desire was not to be of their number. Had I been married before the war I should have been as they; but since I was free to espouse the cause which had become mistress of everything I was I wanted to espouse it.

I thought I had espoused it. I had considered myself bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh. During my months of fighting it had been a satisfaction to think of myself as at liberty to make any sacrifice of limb or life, and leave no heart to bewail me, no eye to shed a tear, and no care to spring up behind me. My family would be content to say, “Poor old Frank, he did his duty!” Further than that, I should bring no regret to any heart but Lovey’s; and of him I was persuaded that if I went he wouldn’t wait long after me. Moreover, I had guarded against any too great misfortune overtaking him by providing for him in my will.

I must own, furthermore, to another misgiving: I was not too sure of myself from the point of view of the old failing.

Things had happened in the trenches—they had dosed me with brandy, whisky, rum, any restorative that came handy, on a number of occasions—and there had been something within me as ready to be waked as a tiger to the taste of blood. I can say truthfully enough that I had never yielded to the desire of my own deliberate act; but I must also say truthfully that I was by no means sure that one day I might not do so. We had talked often enough, as men with men, of what we called a moral moratorium—and the talk haunted me with all manner of suggestions. The ban on what is commonly called sin was to be lifted for the period of the war; and we who had to deny ourselves so much were not to deny ourselves anything that came easily within our grasp. It seemed an alluring condition, and one which, without waiting for the license of supreme war councils or the permission of the Church, each of us was tempted to inaugurate for himself. In a situation in which that which is born of the flesh is flauntingly before one’s eyes, and millions of men are thrown together as flesh and little more, appetite has its mouth wide open. That man was strong indeed who could ignore this yearning of the body; and that man was not I.

So again the consciousness of freedom was like a reserve fund to a corporation. It was something on which to fall back if everything else was swept away. I didn’t want to go to the devil; but if I went no one would suffer but myself, as no one would suffer but myself if a German sniper were to blow the top off my head. Mind you, I am not saying that I came back morally weakened from the war; I only came back with a sense that one man’s life or death—one man’s ruin or salvation—was of no more account than the fate of a roadside bit of jewel-weed amid the infinite seed-time and harvest of the year. I was inured to loss of all kinds on a stupendous scale. I had seen thousands blown to pieces beside me, and my mind had not turned aside to regret them; thousands would see me blown to pieces with the same indifference as to whether I lived or died. Callousness as to the life and death of others induces callousness as to one’s own; and compared to life and death, what is the control of a mere appetite? No; I was not morally weakened; but I was morally benumbed. There was a kind of moral moratorium in my consciousness. I repeat that I wasn’t practically making use of it; but I was in a period of suspense in which I admitted to myself that it might depend on circumstances whether I made use of it or not.

And if I did, and if I was married....

From the sheer possibility my mind turned in dismay. To the celibacy made urgent by a purpose I added the celibacy necessitated by a curse. As the one counseled me not to involve myself with anybody else, so the other warned me not to involve anybody else with me. Through warning and counsel I had kept myself in something like a state of serenity till now.

It was a state of serenity with just one dominating impulse—to get back among the comrades with whom I had already found shelter. Whatever I had that could be called a homing instinct was bound for the house in Vandiver Street. There had been times when I thought I had outlived that phase, times when what seemed like a new and higher companionship, with a new and higher place in the world and in men’s esteem, half persuaded me that I was so little the waster in fact and the criminal in possibility that the Down and Out was no more to me than a sloughed skin to the creature that has thrown it off. But I always waked from this pleasant fancy to see myself as in essentials the same gaunt, tattered, hungry fellow who had come with his buddy to beg a meal and a bed of the Poor Brothers of the Order of Pity, who never refused any homeless, besotted man. No matter what battles I fought, what medals I won, what banquets I was asked to sit down at, my place was among them; and among them I hoped to do my work. They were all American citizens, with as much weight, when it came to the franchise, as the moneyed potentates of Wall Street. As being not only my brethren, but a nucleus of public opinion as well, I had had no other vision before me for my return than that of sharing their humble refreshments and talk, together with that blind, desperate, devoted fraternity which made a city of refuge of the home that had once been Miss Smedley’s.

And since coming on board that vision was threatened by another—one in which I saw myself moving amid compliments and flowers and polite conventions, in all the entangling convolutions of the silken net. Whether it would be with or without love was, in my state of mind, beside the mark. Love had ceased to be, for the time being, at any rate, the ruling factor in a man’s decisions about himself. There was a moratorium of love, let there be one of morals or not. “I’ve got to,” had been the reply to love made by twenty millions of men all over the world, either under compulsion or of their own free will; and women had accepted the answer valiantly.

The difficulty in my case sprang of choice. “I’ve got to” wasn’t imperative enough. Or if imperative, it was imperative on both sides equally.

_CHAPTER XXII_

And then a word was said which, though solving no problems, opened up a new line of suggestion.

I have spoken of Regina Barry as another transmigrated soul. I have said that I could not tell at a glance in what direction her spirit had traveled; nor could I after some days of intercourse. As much as she had been frank and open in the other period of our acquaintance, she had now become mystery to me—elusive, tantalizing, sealed. By the end of a few days I began to perceive that she came near me only, as I might say, officially. If there was danger or storm or darkness—we sailed without lights—she was within reach of me. She was within reach of me many a time if I wanted no more than a book that had fallen or a rug that had been left elsewhere on the deck. It was strange how hovering and protective her presence could be for the moment of need, and how far withdrawn the minute I could get along alone.

And far withdrawn the transmigrated spirit seemed to me at all times. Do what I would to traverse the distance, I found her as remote as ever. Do what I would to break down her defenses or transcend them, they still rose between us, impalpable, impregnable, and all but indiscernible. She had traveled away from me as I had traveled away from her; and yet now that we met in space there was some indefinable bond between us.

It was in right of that bond that I asked her one day why she was going home.

“Oh, for all sorts of reasons.” She added, “One of them is on account of father.”

“Isn’t he well?”

“Yes, he’s well enough. That isn’t it.”

As she did not explain, I refrained from asking further, not because I didn’t want to know, but because I knew she would tell me.

It was our usual trysting-place, the deck rail, though not now that which ran along the side of the ship, but the one across the portion of the upper deck toward the bow, allowing us to look down on the pit in which the few steerage passengers took the air. They were standing about in helpless, idle groups, some ten or twelve oddly clad, oddly hatted men, with three or four of their women, and a white staring baby, whose fingers, as it hung over its mother’s shoulder, dangled like bits of string.

We were in the Gulf Stream, so that the day was comparatively mild. A north wind not too violent blew away the possibility of fog and sent an occasional shaft of sunshine through the rifts in the great gray clouds. The swell left over from the gale of the past few days tossed the ship’s nose into the air with a long, slow, rhythmic heave, slightly to port, and gave to good sailors like ourselves that pleasant sensation of swinging which a bird must get on a tree.

Wind and water were fraught with the nameless peaceful intimations of the New World after the turmoil of the Old one. It is difficult to say how one seizes them, but they come with the Gulf Stream. I have always noticed that half-way over there is a change in the aura, the atmosphere. It throws a breath of balsam on the wind, and flashes on the waves that gleam which Cabot, Jacques Cartier, and the Pilgrims saw when they sighted land.

It is that wonderful sense of going westward which, I suppose, is primal to the instinct. Going eastward, one is going back to beginnings, to things lived, to things over and done with. Going westward, all is hope. It is the onward reach, the upward grasp, the endless striving. It is the lifting of the hands, the straining of the power to achieve, the yearning of the inner man. The thing that is finished is left behind, and the thing to be wrestled with and done is in front of one. The very sun goes before one with a splendid gesture of beckoning—on to work, on to self-denial, on to triumph and success—and when it sets it sets with a promise of a morrow.

We had already begun to feel that; and on my part in a spirit of compunction. I was going, as far as lay within my small powers, to turn the west back upon the east again, to reverse nature by making the stream flow toward its source. I was far from insensible to the pity of it, for I had seen the effect on my own country.

I had seen my own country—that baby giant, whose very existence as a country antedated but little the year when I was born—I had seen it pause in its work, in its play, in its task of self-development—listen—shiver—thrill—throw down the ax, the spade, the hammer, the pick—go up from the field, the factory, and the mine—and offer itself willingly. It was to me as if that was fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet:

“I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me.”

I had seen that first flotilla of thirty-one ships sail down the St. Lawrence, out into the ocean, and over to the shores of England, as the first great gift of men which the New World had ever made to the Old, as some return for all the Old had poured out upon the New. I had seen it, for I was on it. We went gaily, as hop-pickers go to a bean-feast. We knew it was war, but the word had no meaning for us. What it meant we found out at Ypres, at Vimy, at Lens. But when I think of my country now I think of her no longer as a baby giant. She has become a girl widow—valiant, dry-eyed, high-souled, ready to go on with the interrupted work and do bigger work—but a widow all the same.

And the sword that had pierced one heart I was bringing to pierce another. I was sorry; but sorrow didn’t keep me, couldn’t keep me from being terribly in earnest.

And in on these thoughts Regina Barry broke as if she had been following them.

“Look at the waves where the sun catches them. Aren’t they like flashing steel? It’s just as if all the drowned hands at the bottom of the sea were holding up swords to the people of America, begging them to go and fight.”

I looked at her, startled. “You feel that way?”

She looked at me, indignant. “Certainly. How else could I feel?”

“Oh, I didn’t know. Americans feel so many different ways.”

“Because they don’t know. I’m going back”—she gave a light, deprecating laugh—“I’m going back to tell them.”

I was still more startled. “Tell whom?”

“Any one I know. Every one knows some one. I don’t mean to say that I’m a Joan of Arc; but I shall do what I can.”

“And how shall you begin?”

“I’ll begin with father and with—”

She stopped at the second name, though to me the fact did not become significant till afterward.

“That’s what I meant,” she resumed, “when I said I was going back on his account.”

“You mean?”

“He doesn’t see why we should be in it. He’s like so many Americans; he hasn’t emerged from the eighteen-hundreds. He still thinks of the New World as if it was a new creation that had nothing to do with the Old. He doesn’t see that there’s only one world and one race of men, wherever they are and whatever they do. To him Americans are like souls that get over to paradise. They’re safe and can afford to dwell safely. They’re no longer concerned with the sorrows and struggles of the people left on earth.”

It was to get light on my own way that I asked, “And what are you going to say to convince him?”

“I don’t know yet. I shall say what the moment suggests.”

“And you’re sure it will suggest something?”

Her great eyes burned like coals as she turned them on me in protest at the question.

“Suggest something? You might as well ask if the air suggests something. It suggests that I breathe it; but I don’t have to think of it beforehand, when the whole world is full of it.”

“Full of what?”

She considered the question, finding in it all I meant to put there.

“I don’t know,” she answered at last. “That is, I don’t know in any sense that would go into a few words. There’s so much of it. The minute you try to express it from any one point of view you find you’re inadequate.”

I was still seeking light.

“But when you try to do it from several points of view—correlating them?”

“Even then—” She paused, reflecting, shaking her head as she went on again, as if to shake away a consciousness of the impossible. “I don’t try. There’s no use in trying. It’s so immense—so far beyond me. It’s grown so, too. When it first began I could more or less compass it—or, I thought I could. Now it’s become like nature—or God—or any of the colossal infinite conceptions—it means different things to different minds.”

“That is, we can only take of it what we take of the ocean—each a few drops—no one able to take all?”

“Something like that. And we can only give a few drops—just what we’ve got the measure to take up—some a little more, some a little less—but no one more than a little as compared to the whole. That’s why I’m not going to try to explain.”

“Then how are you going to make them understand?”

“I’ll tell them—I’ll do what I can to show them—that the greatest movement of all time is going on—and America is taking no national part in it. I’ll try to make them see that it isn’t just to avenge the few American lives lost through the U-boats, or to free Belgium, or to put down autocracy, or to do any one or two or three of the things that have been set before us. It isn’t even the whole of them, just taken as so many human motives.”

“But you’ll have to tell them what it is, won’t you? It won’t do just to put before them what it isn’t.”

“But how can I? How can any one? It would be like trying to tell them what nature is. It’s a universal composite, made up of everything; but you couldn’t go about the country explaining it in lectures. The nearest I could come to it would be in saying that it’s the great dramatic conflict between good and evil to which human nature has been working up ever since it committed its first sin; but the words in which to do that have been so hard worked and are so terribly worn that they’ve become a kind of ditty. It seems to me best just to talk to them simply—and let them construct the monster out of the bones I lay before them. They’ll do it. The public is not very quick, but when it gets going it’s pretty instinctive.”

“Oh, then you’re going to tackle the public?”

“I’m going to tackle any one to whom I can get access.”

“You spoke just now of lectures.”

“I’ll speak of anything that will help me to get the message across. That’s why I mention father and—” Again she hesitated at a name, going on with an elision:—“first of all. They are simply the first I shall be able to talk to. As a matter of fact, not many as yet have been over there and come back to America—so that there’s a good deal of curiosity still unsatisfied—and so one will get a chance. You must have noticed already how dearly Americans, especially the women, like to be talked to. We’re talked to so much by experts on all subjects that we should burst with knowledge if our minds weren’t like those swimming-tanks with fresh water running in and out of them all the time.”

“So you’re really going to make it a kind of business?”

She spread her hands apart, palms outward.

“What else can I do? I assure you it isn’t any desire for publicity or that sort of thing. I’m just—I’m just driven on. It’s like what some one says in the Bible—I’ve taken to reading the Bible lately—it seems the only thing big enough in spirit to go with the big times—but some one says there: ‘Woe unto me, if I preach not the gospel!’ Well, it’s the same way with me. Woe unto me if I don’t do this thing! It’s taken possession of me; I can’t do anything else; and so I’m going back—”

I was expressing but one of the host of thoughts that crowded on me as I said: “You’ve got the tremendous advantage of being an American. You can say what you like. If I were—”

She stood off and surveyed me. “You don’t need to say anything. You speak for yourself. One has only to look at you.”

I smiled ruefully. “I know I’m pretty well battered up.”

“Oh, it isn’t that.”

“What is it, then?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s just—it’s just everything. You’re a type. I’m not speaking of you personally, but of a lot—hundreds—thousands—I’ve seen—young fellows who make me think of some other words in the Bible.”

“What are they?”

“They’re in Isaiah, I think. Everybody knows them.” She recited in a smooth, rich voice that gave new beauty to the familiar passage: “‘Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: ... He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.’” Her voice rose—and fell again. “‘He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.’” She resumed in a colloquial tone: “I’ve seen so much of that, haven’t you? The lamb led dumb to the slaughter, and the quiet, wounded man hardly opening his mouth for a moan. It’s heartbreaking.”

“And yet you’d bring your own people into it.”

“Because it’s sublime. Because I’ve seen for myself that the people who take part in it are raised to levels they never knew it was possible to reach. Haven’t you found the same thing for yourself?”

“Oh, I? I’m only—”

“You’re a man—and a young man. You’re a young man who’s been—I can’t express it. It’s all in that fact. The people at home will only have to look at you to see what language could never put before them. Language isn’t equal to it. Imagination isn’t equal to it when the thing is over. Don’t you find that? Doesn’t it often seem to you, now that you’re out of it, as if it was a dream that had half escaped you? You try to tell it—and you can’t. That’s why the people who’ve been there and come back so often have nothing to say. That’s why so many of the books—except those that contain diaries jotted down on the minute—that are written afterward are so often disappointing. It’s like a great secret in every man’s soul that he knows and thinks about, and can never get out of him. So I shall make no attempt to do more than to tell the little things, the small human details—”

You will see that I was following my own train of thought as I broke in, “But New York life will get hold of you again.”

“It can’t get hold of me again, because there will be nothing for it to catch on by. That’s all over for me. It could no more seize anything I am now than you or I”—she pointed to a flock of little birds riding up and down on a long, smooth billow—“from the deck of this ship could catch one of those Mother Carey’s chickens.”

My sensations were those of a man who has received an extraordinary bit of good news, like that of a great artistic triumph or the inheritance of a fortune. It was something that went to the foundations of life, bathing them in security and peace. As we continued to talk the swing of the boat became the lulling of strong arms.

The conflict of which for the past few days my mind had been the battle-ground was suddenly appeased. Woman, love, marriage, the more comforting elements in life—were no longer in opposition to what had become a man’s pressing and sacred duties. There could be a love which asked for no moratorium; or rather, there could be a woman with the courage of a soldier.

I began to see her as comparable to that crusader’s wife who, disguised as a page, followed her lord on his journeys, to share his perils and minister to his needs. In a modern girl it was not only romantic; it was adorable. That it should have been done for me was beyond my power to believe. None but the bravest and most daring spirit would have attempted it—none but the heart capable of climbing higher and more adventurously still. I had known her for a gallant soul from that midnight minute when she pulled aside her hangings and found me lurking in her chamber; but I had never made a forecast of the heroisms and fidelities expanding here like the beauty from the heart of a rose.

_CHAPTER XXIII_