Chapter IV: Part II: I (1)

_December_
_Littledale_

Almost three weeks have passed since I last wrote a line in this book,--three weeks crowded with events which have turned the current of my life into ways of which I never dreamed. I am here, in my old room, a log fire snapping in the fireplace, the window sills banked with snow, and the clock on the landing below has rung eleven times. I have sat before these written pages a full half-hour, tempted to destroy all,--yielding to the sense of the futility in my life. Has it been but three weeks since the night I sat and listened to Brinsmade in the Chapon Fin at Bordeaux? To-day every logical consideration is scattered to the winds as I realize with an acute pain what sport we are in the veiled hands of chance. Into my life has come the greatest exaltation and the greatest emptiness, so inextricably interwoven that I know not what to name it, pleasure or pain,--this emotion which has imprisoned all my faculties with the sudden awakening of a great love.

I do not know that I shall ever see her again; I have given my promise never to seek her out. Why? I do not know. Simply because, for her own reasons, she implored it of me, and to her slightest wish I would be as powerless to offer opposition as to consciously give her physical pain. I have spoken of the mystery of good and evil that is in each of us. To-day it is a mystery more baffling than ever. As I look back now, what I marvel at most is that I should have met Bernoline at the very moment when I had so complacently, in my worldly wisdom, accepted the easy path held open to me. Two women will ever remain before me as the embodiment of the twin contending mysteries in my soul: Letty, who stands as the sinister embodiment of all those fierce, primal instincts which in civilization we name evil; and Bernoline, who has reached deep into the hidden needs of which I was ignorant and revealed to me a self I did not know,--a self against whose imperious idealism I rebel, but a self which will, to the end of my days, dominate me and determine my actions. One has vanished into the wilderness of men, and the other returns, a sinister memory, which is a cross to be borne day by day, behind a mask that must forever stand between me and my brother.

At Bordeaux I had but explored the mystery of evil; the mystery of good was still unknown to me.

* * * * *

As I look back now, every word, every object, every outline is clear to me from the first instant of our meeting. It is as though with the sudden stirring of my deeper nature every little sense awoke. There are colors, the oranges in a straw basket, the blue of a porter on the dock, the gray whirl of her scarf against the blue Breton cape on the upper deck as we passed out of France, the red luxury of the sunset that swam over our heads that last day at sea,--all these tints and a dozen others are associated in the minutest visualization along with the scent of tarred ropes about us at Bordeaux, the clean brine of the sea which held us ten unforgettable days, the sound of the forecastle bell tolling off the hours, and the light, slipping step which I would know to-day from a thousand others.

It was in the wet dawn of late November that I first saw her, and the memory starts up before my eyes, even to the most irrelevant details. I can see again the moist dock, the gray flanks of the ocean liner shutting out the sky, the masts dissolving in the morning mist and the white splotches of faces flowering against the rails. The salt, tarred smell of the sea is still in my nostrils and I am back in the crowd of leave-takers, saying the last broken farewells; an old couple clinging to their son, a sailor with his sweetheart. Boatswains are piping, cabmen swearing, loiterers gazing; a smirched face looms as a little wharf rat bumps against me, and--I look up and see her again--as I saw her for the first time.

She stood heavily veiled, her arm about an old servant in a Breton cap, who was weeping her heart out,--a very old woman, wrinkled and stooped, whose lips trembled, whose eyes never ceased their staring intentness. It was not simply grief at parting, often hysterical in servants, but something inexpressibly deeper; not so much a protest as a final resignation to a weight of sorrow beyond old age’s power to bear.

At this moment, her young mistress lifted her veil and, as she bent forward to kiss each shriveled cheek, I saw her face out of the mist and the blurred crowd--as I see it now--and no second glance could ever add to that instant conviction. The whistle blew above us. The old woman cried something hysterically and caught the young hand to her lips. I heard her murmur a blessing, I saw her try to disengage her hand, and then as, helplessly, she sought for assistance, her look met mine. I know that my eyes were dim. She saw and trusted them. I stepped forward, bare-headed.

“_Permettez--Madame?_”

“_Merci, Monsieur--vous êtes bien bon._”

The veil dropped again. I put my hand under the old woman’s arm and drew her slowly away. When I returned, her young mistress was already on the boat.

I do not know that I can describe her, for when I see her face I see only the eyes, dark, round and big, without guile or artifice, eyes that were open and luminous, and yet eyes that were stricken with a suffering too deep to be cast off in tears. It was not what I saw but what I felt,--the inner quality, the sweet dignity, the gentleness and the high aristocracy. Women, before, had been to me types. In her, instantly, I discerned a being set apart, whose choice of action could never proceed from feminine acceptance of the hour’s fashion in dress, thought and standards. She was what she was, and would go forward always along her clear path, undisturbed by the troubling blast of the popular wind. I knew that for the first time I had looked into eyes which no ugliness, no meanness, no unworthy thought could ever trouble, and that I was of the privileged of the world to have seen her. One look, a look that might pass a thousand times--one look in the mists of the dawn, in the scrambling, shoddy crowd--and yet, for that one instant’s fugitive understanding, all that I had been and was became as nothing, and my destiny--for better or worse, for ill and pain and sorrow, emptiness and loneliness--was irrevocably determined. Yes, mystery of the good and evil that is in us! From the pain of evil, we struggle back to sanity and clean air and memory covers over the scar, but from the emptiness and the ache that, in the mystery of good, love may lay upon our lives, what escape or what answer is there?

* * * * *

Last night I left off when the memory was too acute and my eyes could no longer see to write. To-night, I come back to it, impatiently, with a longing to reclaim every word, every look, every precious minute, and fix it indelibly before me. The situation here is hideous. I seem to be walking over a mine that sooner or later will go off, while I can do nothing but await the final catastrophe. To write is to return to her, to hope again that somehow, somewhere, without being false to my promise, I shall see her again.

II

The gangplank swung out as I stepped on the deck, the air shrilling with the chirp of whistles and the creak of pulleys. I shouldered through the motley crowd and joined Mr. Brinsmade on the upper deck. I remember how solemnly I looked down on the France I knew and loved, and with what reluctant apprehension of the future I watched the gray hawser stiffen.

“Strange, to be going?”

“Yes--incredibly strange,” I said slowly. “I can’t quite believe it; for whole months to be a free agent--no longer a part of a great orderly machine, without eyes or ears or will. I think I have forgotten what the other world is like.”

“Do you regret this?”

“Regret it? Yes, it’s hard to leave a thing unfinished when you’ve gone so far. And, though I’ve hated it and cursed it, well, it is a different conception of humanity, after all, this doing a thing as a mass. I’ve accepted it, readjusted myself to it. I think it’s not the question of liking it or not liking it; it’s the feeling of the inevitable and the wanting to measure up to other men. I stopped debating with myself the day I saw a man at my side go to his death. He was a scullion out of the kitchen of a New York hotel--Carlo Roger--deserter and rascal. He could have remained, and no one would have cared. He did his duty, unnoticed. I couldn’t do less.”

I looked up, and then down, and added, “Better hold on tight to me, Mr. Brinsmade. I feel like making a jump for it.”

Laughing he passed his arm through mine and pretended not to notice the dimness in my eyes.

“You’ve known humanity at its best, my boy,” he said. “And I, thank God, have had a glimpse of it. And when you’re like myself, a weather-worn old lawyer, who walks behind the scenes, that’s something to be thankful for. Well--if they’re not of our race--they’re the same human beings: we can share that.”

“I feel that way.”

A group of ambulance drivers descended upon us, with their fragmentary chatter.

“Boat in had a close shave.”

“Missed a torpedo by twenty feet.”

“Come off! Every one’s seeing submarines!”

“Hope we pick one up.”

“Say, what’s the matter with this boat?”

“Off for the good old U. S. A!”

A great blast of steam shook the air above us, sending its wet vapors against our cheeks. The gangway swung clear and rolled back on the dock. Another moment, and the big ship trembled beneath our feet and slowly and definitely veered out against the straining hawsers.

We left the noisy exuberance of the crowd and went down the deck, in search of quieter moods.

“Here’s our spot.”

I followed Mr. Brinsmade and slipped between two lifeboats. Then, abruptly, we stopped. The railing was already tenanted by a young woman.

If she heard our exclamation she did not change from the rigidity of her pose. We hesitated, moving to one side, and lifted our hats in a sobered deference and, I knew, through our minds flashed the same thought: she was French and France was receding from her eyes.

One hawser still held us to the land, like a faint memory stretching back into the past. Then a sudden hissing contortion whipped over the widening waters. And so, with the parting of that link, one chapter had ended for me and another, that in the wildest flight of my imagination I could never have divined, had begun.

Instinctively I raised my eyes and recognized my chance acquaintance of the dock.

* * * * *

She had fallen back against the life boat, arms rigidly extended, holding the railing from her. A gray film hid her features, wound about her neck and stood out in a long flutter, a ripple of light against the dark unanimity of her costume. Youth and sorrow are two great emotions which cannot be disguised. I felt, despite the rigidity of the body which told of the stricken soul, the young grace and dignity. I hoped that she would notice me, but she remained in staring oblivion. Yet, though I had spoken but a half dozen words to her, I can remember how keen was the sense of her presence at my side and how, on the instant, I forgot my personal emotions and seemed to be entering into the moods of the woman whose first glance had brought me a sense of intimacy.

I looked, and then I looked away, with a guilty consciousness of trespassing on her grief. Yet, though my glance was averted, I was looking back with her eyes. My companion spoke to me: I did not hear.

I was thinking of the wrench of old affections for her--the venture into the uncharted new--the fading of the homeland that was in her heart by a thousand memories.

Below, the swift currents of the Garonne ran from us, swift as the currents of time. Faces of blue-shirted dock hands grew blurred. Flashes of red trousers, gray-blue uniforms, brown and black of women’s dresses merged into a momentary tapestry. The ungainly, lumbering motor-boat, with a hulking colossus balanced at the tiller, dropped behind. Blue-tiled roofs slipped away. Cathedral spires came out against the horizon, like the spoutings of huge sea monsters. The grassy shores flowed back with the current. Wharves, factories, lean shipyards with naked iron arms extended, tilted ships discharging cargoes, brown vineyards combing the aged slopes, tramp steamers in dusty garments, Swedish and Greek, under the imperial banner of Britain, the Tricolor, the Stars and Stripes; tubs, derelicts, old men of the sea, reclaimed and pressed into service,--all the multiple, incongruous aspects of war crowded about our passing, and always that revelation of the human note, the swarming sea adventurers, undaunted, incredulous of the odds, contemptuous of man’s malignant genius for slaying man.

I hazarded another glance at my companion and, perceiving her still oblivious to our presence, my glance remained, my sympathies quickened by a hundred remembered scenes of parting. I could not see her eyes for the veil that hid them but, instinctively, I divined the yearning of their backward look.

Heavens, how I knew that last look! How many times, in crowded depot or passing train, I had seen on the faces of women, dry-eyed and staring, that look of the soul’s rebellion, the last renunciation, the last groping for a final memory to bear down the lonely years. France, land of her childhood and girlish dreams; France, of precious sorrows and what affections: France, of her long race and living prayers, was receding before the weakening vision that rebelled.

“I say, Davy.”

I came to myself at the touch of Mr. Brinsmade’s hand.

“I don’t think we’ve a right here, do you?”

Then, and then only, I realized how profound had been my absorption.

“No, no, guess you’re right.”

As we started to withdraw, a couple of sailors, preparing to swing the lifeboats for the night’s perilous dash into haunted seas, came shuffling up.

“_Pardon, Messieurs._”

“All right--moving out.”

“_Pardon, Mamzelle._”

The sailor hesitated, shuffled and touching his cap, repeated his request, unnoticed. As he stood there awkwardly, undecided, I stepped to her side, raising my hat.

“_Pardon, Mademoiselle. Les matelots._”

She turned, and I felt her staring blankly at us, as though in the long blur of faces she were unable to separate friends, acquaintances and enemies. But, immediately perceiving the situation, she thanked me with a little nod and turning, said:

“_Je vous dérange--mil pardons._”

There was a tired note in the modulated voice that I remember to this day,--the weariness of too much struggling.

From the sailors a chorus went up.

“_Pas de quoi, Mamzelle!_”

“_Ne vous donnez pas la peine._”

They made way for her deferentially, fingers to their caps, simple-hearted men, quick to feel and sure to recognize the finer metal.

“_Merci, Messieurs._”

A slight inclination of her head, and she had passed down the deck to the further rail.

“I didn’t realize I was staring,” I blurted out.

“Yes--a little too openly.”

“Perhaps. It rather got me--took me back to the mobilization, and the depots--the look on the faces of the women; when you’ve seen it you can’t forget it.”

We moved to the rear and talked of desultory things, as we hung on the rail and watched the steerage. Below, a returning _permissionaire_, perched on a capstan, was playing on a harmonica the defiant strains of “Sambre et Meuse,” a group of cattlemen from a torpedoed ship, stretched about him, basking in the sun. The martial air quickened the blood in my veins. I saw a regiment growing out of the mists of the morning, gaunt, grim and proud, bandaged and limping, returning with their memories from the trenches. I have seen many a dress parade after battle and been thrilled; but I still can remember that first knowledge of the living returning from the dead to the rolling drums of the “Sambre et Meuse.”

“I want to love my country like that,” I said suddenly. “I want to get the same thrill when the regiment swings up the street--” I broke off. “I don’t know just how I’ll fit in. I’m afraid they won’t understand my way of looking at things. I’m rather dreading the test.”

“You’ll get that thrill.”

“I wonder. We all seem to be pulling for ourselves: liberty, individualism, yes; but real nationalism--the thing that’s a religion--the thing you get over here--that makes it worth while to die.”

“Wait until we understand.”

Some one in the khaki of a volunteer ambulance hailed me.

“David Littledale, ’08. Remember me? Joe Hungerford. Heard you were on board. What luck!”

I turned to shake hands. It was the same Joe Hungerford of school and college days, lively and irrepressible, a pink and white complexion, a mischief-loving eye, a quick smile and a clear visage, incapable of wrong, deceit, subtleties, or an unnecessary mental operation,--a boy, as his nation was young.

“Who’d thought to run in on you, Big Dale? Glad to meet you, Mr. Brinsmade. You know my father--Sam Hungerford, of the Illinois Central? Quite a crowd on board. Say, do you think there is any chance of our sighting a submarine?”

“Same old Joe,” I said, laughing. “You wouldn’t feel anything if you were being led out to be shot.”

“The devil I wouldn’t.” But, in the midst of a retort, perceiving a familiar face below, he was off, with an exclamation: “Hello! If there isn’t Frangipani! See you later!”

“There’s your young America.”

“Yes,” I assented. “And a pretty good sort, too. It does everything but think. That sounds rather hard; but that was what I was, three years ago.”

“I suppose it was the feeling of the game, the bigger game, that got you in it?”

“Frankly, yes; more or less. And that’s true of most of us. Not all, though. But once in, we got a touch of the other thing.”

“Don’t be too quick to judge when you get over there,” he said, divining my thoughts. “Public opinion is complex, but there is one thing that decides America in the end, always,--idealism. It’s a quality that is our weakness and our salvation. It makes us the prey to quacks and demagogues, until we learn to see through them. But it is the air we breathe and no one can lead us long away from it.”

“I say, Mr. Brinsmade,” I broke in, “don’t put me down for the sort of expatriate who goes round damning his country--”

“My dear David,” he said, laying his hand on my arm, “don’t worry. I feel even more strongly than you do. And it’s a big test that’s coming; make no mistake. It’s our kind that’s failing, not America. Somehow, the class that ought to lead, doesn’t.”

We separated on that, and I went down to arrange my cabin, a little uncomfortable at what I had said, and wondering if my listener had not been all the while smiling tolerantly at my youthful pessimism,--for though I am obstinate in my opinions, I do not express them easily in conversation.

When I returned the early twilight was sifting in. I went to the upper deck, with a vague feeling of uneasiness which to this day I cannot explain. Invisible nets descended between us and the fading world; the ship itself, its masts and its traveling rails, was dissolving in the flowing in of the dusk. I went directly to the rear, and twenty feet away I saw her as I had expected, a blot against the rail. She did not turn at my approach, though we were alone on the creaking deck. Twice I came to the railing at her side, hesitated and turned away. She was there, like a statue of bereavement, oblivious of all but the France that was now but the faint iterated flashing of distant lights.

I do not know how long I continued there, pacing off the deck under the swinging spaces of the night. All my instincts urged me to her side, and all my education warned me against the intrusion. I felt so keenly her utter loneliness, the mysterious sense of some overwhelming sorrow, the exhaustion of an unending struggle, that twice, with some hasty phrase on my lips, I stopped, determined to speak to her. But each time I turned away. Yet, each time, I remember the angry rebellion that came into my heart at the tyranny of convention which interposed between us. Had she been a woman of the people,--how easy it would have been! But she was not. She was of my own kind, and convention dictated that I should pass on and leave her there in the melancholy of the damp night, eating out her heart.

What was it came to me at that moment? What inexplicable intuition of danger? I had left her with a feeling of my utter helplessness, when, with my hand on the door, I stopped, looking out into the dark void, where sea and sky had disappeared and but a single step led into Infinity.

But a single step and such an easy step! Suddenly I turned, went to her directly, and said:

“_Mademoiselle--pardon, Mademoiselle_; you must not--_vous ne pouvez rester ici_.”

The emotion in my voice startled her. Her head turned hastily; she swayed and leaned heavily on the rail. I felt the stiffening of her body against the impertinence of my intrusion, and all my assurance fled.

“Monsieur, I do not think I understood you.”

She answered me slowly, in excellent English, with only the slightest accent.

“I beg your pardon, humbly. Please don’t think I mean to be impertinent,” I stammered back, “but I don’t think it is good for you to stay up here--all alone.”

I felt how ridiculous this must have sounded, and broke off lamely.

“By what right?”

“No right, Mademoiselle; just a human impulse, that’s all--just the feeling that you are in great sorrow and that you shouldn’t be left alone,--not here, at least. I feel it very strongly, Mademoiselle.”

“Monsieur, there are some sorrows that are sacred.”

The words, the accent, the suffering implied went to my heart. I felt then as I have ever felt since the indefinable superiority of her gentle nature over mine.

“Mademoiselle, I know that this may seem incomprehensible to you; I have been walking here half an hour, before I dared to speak to you, but--but I cannot go away and leave you here alone.”

Saying which, I bowed and moved away a little distance and took my station resolutely. Presently she said:

“Monsieur--you will not leave me?”

“I cannot, Mademoiselle.”

“Oh, please go away; please leave me alone!”

Her voice broke and, as I hurried to her side, she put her head suddenly down on her arms. A film of her veil whipped by the wind caught my arm, and by this slender bond I held her in my protection.

“Mademoiselle, I, too, am a soldier of France; I have fought with your people: must I turn from one of my own kind who, I know, is in distress, just because of conventionality! You are in distress, and I know it. Please let me judge for you at this moment. You must not stay up here alone. I mean it.”

“But I want to be alone.”

It was the weak voice of a child that now fought against me.

“I know I am right,” I said with difficulty, for then, as ever, all my impulse was to do her bidding. But it was the thought of the void without and that unseen step that gave me courage to resist her. “I know how impertinent this must seem to you. It is not meant that way. Do believe that. You must go down on the lower deck. You really must.”

She straightened up and there, cloaked by the night, facing each other, our wills clashed. A moment--a long moment--then, yielding, she turned and I followed by her side. Halfway down the deck she stopped.

“Just a second.”

She leaned back against the lifeboat, her hand to her throat.

“Now.”

I piloted her below and found her a chair near mine. She suffered me to wrap her up without further objection.

“There are no lights to-night and all passengers are ordered to spend the night on deck. You will be quite alone here. Good-night and thank you.”

If she answered me I did not hear her. I left her purposely and went aimlessly through the ship, with something new and strange stirring in my brain.

III

I know now that I loved her from the first meeting of our eyes. I did not realize it then nor for many days after. The impulse that drew me to her was so imperious that I yielded completely to it, without power of pausing to put questions to myself.

* * * * *

That night I was possessed of many conflicting emotions. I was an American again after years of exile, making contact with my own kind, accustoming my ear to old accents, familiar phrases, forgotten bits of slang, my heart warming with their exuberance, their youthful spirits. Even the drummer by my side at the table, nasal, rough and loquacious, was a type so comprehensible that I found myself beaming with grateful pleasure as he talked of “God’s country,” stretched for the hors d’oeuvres, and addressed his neighbor as “Sonny.”

Supper was a hasty, scrambling meal, with the portholes sealed. The crowd was oddly mixed, like a herd of refugees arrived from an inundation; a score of young ambulance men returning, the gray-blue of a few French officers, sailors and officers from torpedoed boats, crews of cattle boats, commercial travelers, and those endless rovers of the sea, dressmakers and journalists. The conversation, freed by the sense of the abnormal, rose about me without restriction.

“What are we stoppin’ down here for?”

“Moon’s coming up: waiting for it to cloud over.”

“Why that?”

“Clear moon’s what submarines like, lady. They can see us, and we can’t see them.”

“That’s how they got us, second night out of Genoa, just a ripple blowing, and full moon.”

“What were you in?”

“Three-master, carrying lumber--that we’d landed--return voyage. Well, I ain’t got no kick coming. We pulled off ten round trips, and the balance is on the right side.”

“Torpedoed?”

“Yep--and sunk in ten minutes.”

“Spry work getting into boats?”

“Sure was.”

“All off?”

“Most of us.”

“Where was your section?”

“We were up in the Vosges.”

“Know Harrity?”

“He was down in Verdun with us.”

“That was rather hot, wasn’t it?”

“Quite hot enough.”

“Shucks! I don’t believe there’s any danger,” said a voice.

“If they sank us, it would mean war, sure.”

“That is, if it could be proved: and what chance would there be of proving it, a night like this?”

“Guess that’s sense, too; besides, there’s always a chance at a mine.”

Joe Hungerford joined me as I left the table.

“Going to spend the night on deck?”

“It’s orders.”

A little moonlight had come filtering in between the decks, as the heavy moon rolled up over the horizon. A faint streak ran along the railing and touched the stanchions with the luster of fallen snow. In the shadows we could distinguish shapes stretched out on steamer chairs, while others arrived, trailing life preservers and rugs, with an occasional handbag.

“Quite a picnic.”

“Don’t like the children being around, Hungerford.”

“No, that’s not pleasant. If it weren’t for that, wouldn’t mind having a run in with a submarine. Hello--sounds like the anchor coming up.”

We mounted to the upper deck, under the open sky, with its opalescent tints and shifting clouds to the west. Red lights and green lights on ghostlike shadows dotted the stretch of foggy water. Ahead, from the last sentinel of the world underfoot, a shaft of light came whirling in broken iteration,--like a can of fire that a small boy whirls in the night. A group of sailors shuffled by. The shrill of a whistle, the thrum of engines, and ahead the whirling beacon crept around the bow and, returning, slid down amidships. The door shot out its feeble ray of light. A group from the smoking room crowded out to witness the running of the channel. Then, a sudden rise of voices.

“Well, bring on your submarines!”

“If they get us, I take my chances on deck.”

“You young fellows are mighty chipper; wait till you get shaken up once.”

“Well, you got away, didn’t you?”

“Gosh, with that light playing on us, anything ought to hit us.”

“Back to the good old U. S. A., boys!”

“Well, enough scenery! Let’s start up a game!”

There was a laugh, and the crowd shuffled back to the card room.

“Going to sit in, Littledale? It’s a good crowd.”

“Perhaps, later.”

I went below, bundled up my great-coat, fished out a couple of life preservers, and groped my way to my chair. She was there as I had placed her, but in the black of the deck I could not tell whether she was awake or asleep. I hesitated a moment and then, slipping in, made myself comfortable for the night.

Brinsmade at my right was struggling with a tinder which refused to light.

“Have a _briquet_,” said a voice.

“Thanks.”

The next moment the steel struck sparks and an odor of burning tobacco filled the air. Slight as had been the light it provoked remonstrances and down the deck the plaint of a woman was heard.

“I don’t see why they allow such a thing as that!”

“No lights!”

“Put it out!”

“Good many persons seem unduly excited about submarines,” said the voice of our neighbor, high-pitched, pleasing, if not resonant.

“Well--there’s always a risk.”

“Hardly. Germany doesn’t want us in the war.”

“Germany? Think so? From what I’ve seen of her, she doesn’t care what we think or any one else--except what she wants at the time.”

Our new acquaintance was silent a moment, as though unwilling to venture too rapidly forward.

“Well, thank God, we’re out of it!” he said, at last. “The election settled that. If it had gone the other way, there might be a little more excitement.”

“Pacifist?”

“Absolutely.”

There was a long silence, broken at last by a question.

“Been over long?”

“Three months.”

“In France?”

“Yes.”

“So--and you still come back with those ideas?” said Brinsmade’s bass voice, studiously polite but with a note of criticism.

“Does that mean you’d have us in the war?” said the other, in a tone which showed that he recognized the criticism and resented it. “To pull the chestnuts out of the fire for France and England?”

“Over on business?”

“No, I don’t desire peace to keep on making money,” answered the other, with a suavity which suggested a smile. “I am a journalist. Suppose I’d better warn you--a socialist; worse, still--the editor of _The Protest_.”

“_The Protest?_ Yes, I read it,” said the other. “Then you are Peter Magnus?”

“Now you know the worst.”

“Glad to know you. Well, I’m rather on the other side. Stephen B. Brinsmade,--one of the unconvicted rich, I suppose you’d call us.”

“Really? And you read _The Protest_?” said Magnus in surprise. “May I ask why?”

“Why I read it? Certainly; to know what the other side thinks.” He laughed, and continued with the good humor men of politics use as a cloak but which in his case was the complacency of success. “Honestly, I’m glad to meet you, Magnus, and I look forward to talking things over with you. That’s rather odd, for I suppose we’ll get to hating each other cordially. However, I’ll promise to keep my temper.”

“I don’t see why.”

“Well--that’s my experience. Men can meet in physical combat and, the struggling over, sit down over a friendly chop. They may fight each other with their wits; as lawyers, blackguard each other in public for the benefit of the unsuspecting jury, and retain a friendly liking; but when it comes to a combat of ideas, we seem to acquire a secret antipathy for the man who disagrees with us.”

“That’s because the conflict of ideas is the most fundamental and irrepressible of all conflicts,” said Magnus thoughtfully.

“Quite right.” Brinsmade drew on his pipe until the ashes reddened, outlining the fingers which screened it. Then he began to whistle, softly, to himself, drawing in his breath.

Outside, the lighthouse was sinking into the sea, while the whirling beams continued to blazon the sky like flashes of heat lightning. To the south a star swam out from the horizon, swelled and glittered, as a new lighthouse took up its warning. A rift of clouds spread over the risen moon, obscuring the crested ripples that had been following us. A patrol of sailors went heavily overhead, to the sound of a dragging rope, the creak of a pulley,--and through the hiss of cleft waters and the whistle of the wind the thud of powerful engines shook the decks.

“Feels like ‘Full Speed,’ Davy,” said Brinsmade. “Guess we’re clear.”

“Suppose we’re convoyed. Well, anyhow, it’s clouded over, and that’s a good thing. Hardly think there’s any danger,” said Magnus.

“Neither did our friends on the _Lusitania_.” Brinsmade changed the subject to one which had evidently been in his mind. “So you’ve been over here in this hallowed land three months, and you come back with the same ideas you started with?”

“Only more so.”

“No offence. Most men I know have had their pre-conceived ideas pretty badly shaken up. That’s my own experience. Well--time enough to discuss all that. Only--I’ll say this. Whatever you may think of war, and I was a good deal of a pacifist, myself, to have been over here, to see what this old world is capable of in a crisis, gives me a better liking for my fellow man. I haven’t always had a very affectionate regard for him. But, by Jove, what I’ve seen of this people over here makes me respect myself a little more just as a plain human being!”

“You’re plumb right there, Mister, whoever you may be!” said a voice back of us, a voice with the nasal Yankee twang.

“It is glorious, I grant you,” said Magnus quietly.

“But useless?”

“Quite useless, because it accomplishes nothing toward a final solution; but, of course, where we differ, and, I suppose, in all arguments will come back to it, is that I don’t admit the necessity of nationality.”

“That’s frank, and glad you mentioned it,” said Brinsmade, with a certain joy. “For that is the one big thing that has come out of the war, and it’s bigger than creed or politics, Magnus. See what happened to your German Socialists! It’s the rock on which you’ve split!”

“For the present, quite true,” said Magnus, “but it’s the backbone of Socialism and, if we are not internationalists, we are not Socialists.”

“Why?”

“Well--put it this way. You’ll agree that war is savagery, and contrary to the spirit of civilization; in other words, that what we are all seeking is a final and enduring peace?”

“Two years ago I’d have agreed. Now, I’m not quite so sure I do believe that is possible in our vision. However, for the sake of argument, go on.”

“What is war? Competition. Competition of what? Of rival nationalities. Seeking what? Commercial aggrandizement--subjecting the many to benefit the few. America, Germany, England, France have been at war with each other commercially one hundred years. War is only a commercial ultimatum, when a commercial tariff is too slow. The trouble is, men are guided by their sentiments to think nationally, instead of by their logic to conceive of themselves as a world race.”

“You are a Jew, of course, Magnus?”

“I am.”

“And proud of the history of your race?”

“I am exceedingly proud.”

“And rightfully. It is a wonderful race. But if it had been guided by such theories as you now profess, it would have disappeared centuries ago, like a drop of ink in a barrel of water. Racial solidarity has been the immortality of you Jews, and sometimes--no offence, Magnus--I’m inclined to believe that the instinct that moves many of your brilliant race into Socialism is a contempt of mere national definitions which in your own world-solidarity have no meaning to you.”

“The Jewish race is not socialistic,” said Magnus, with a note of impatience.

“It is increasingly so, and most of its intellectuals are.”

“It was not a Jew, but William Lloyd Garrison, who said ‘Our Country is the world.’”

“A fair rejoinder in a debate, but we are not appealing to the applause of an audience, but, I take it, as two men holding diametrically opposite opinions, honestly seeking to find out what each believes.”

“All right,” said Magnus, evidently favorably influenced by the other’s good nature, for he answered more frankly. “It is possibly true that the Jewish race is most ready to embrace the principle of internationalism on account of its past history. I will grant that. But that does not affect the general proposition. Pacifism, which is good Christianity, is the first step to internationalism, and don’t forget that the most determined opponents of militarism are of a Christian sect,--your Quakers.”

“Two years ago,” said Brinsmade, carefully, “when I called myself a pacifist, I might have denied that. By pacifism then I meant opposition to war,--the belief in the possibility of universal disarmament and settlement of all difficulties by arbitration. But I never associated that with internationalism.”

“Am I not logical when I say that pacifism must be considered the first step to internationalism?” said Magnus. There was in his voice the persuasive gentleness of the born debater, who is confident of leading his opponent to the conclusion he seeks. “If you wish nations to renounce warring on each other by arms, isn’t it because we are coming to the point of view that we are all human beings on the same globe, artificially divided by national lines? And if it is abhorrent to you that one nation should murder another with gunpowder, isn’t it just as wrong to seek by commercial warfare to impoverish and reduce an inferior to a state of commercial slavery, a portion of the same human race?”

I sat up, listening with strong attention. Thoughts which had struggled for clarification in my own deliberate mind started up. Once or twice I had come near breaking in with a question, so close to my own problems had the debate come. Here were two men discussing theories that might apply in a thousand years, when the immediate problem was this present thing: what should a nation--my nation--do in this world crisis, for its greater good?

“Well, now, Magnus--there’s logic in what you say, and I’m the more ready to admit it in that I haven’t the slightest patience with what I used to believe.”

“What’s changed you?”

“France. Keeping my eyes open and seeing things as they are in this world, and not as I want them to be. Your internationalism is a political millennium, which will come just about as soon as the other millennium. I used to think that we were all pretty much alike, English, American, German, and French. I’ve found out we’re not. We’re not pursuing the same ideas. The English world has settled down to an easy-going existence, each man sufficient unto himself, occupied in his own private affairs, getting farther and farther away from his national ideal, looking on government as a convenient policeman, a central telephone, and all that. And then, there’s Germany--and the explanation of Germany is national solidarity--every man fitting into the national scheme, and every man working for the national aggrandizement. ‘_Deutschland uber alles!_’ We used to laugh at that. I don’t. It impresses me now. And it terrifies me.”

“Do you want to live under such a system?”

“I’ll come back to that. No, I don’t want to be subjected to that. That’s why I’m done with pacifism. Because the world’s up against not simply German armies but the German idea. And we may as well admit that it is the German idea that’s got to be destroyed or adopted: no two ways.”

“What does the man in the fields, or the man in the street, care about all that?” said Magnus softly.

“If the French peasant and the French workman can understand that, I guess we can,” said Brinsmade. “I said France has changed me over to a belief in a strong national feeling. It has. I don’t want German militarism, but I want the sort of military education you see in the French army,--preparation, with absolute democracy.”

“Compulsory service?”

“Of course. And I want it because I want my sons to be educated into democracy, and I know no better way than sending them out for a year or two to rough it with the fellow who comes up out of the mines and fields, out of the city slums and the wharves. I want them to eat together, tramp together, sleep together, to learn how to talk to each other. I want them to respect a man, wherever found, and I want them to make themselves respected as men. Moreover, I want them to have a vision of what America is and can be. Why? Because the wealth I leave them is going to make them leaders and instead of artificial leadership I want intelligent leadership.”

“You’ll never get compulsory training in America,” said Magnus shortly. “That’s one thing I’m not worrying about.”

“If we need it for nothing else, we need it to digest our foreign classes,” said Brinsmade, warming up; “German, Italian, Russian, Greek, Swedish; we need it for self-education, to form our own race,--a clear-cut, united American type. But of course,” he said, stopping suddenly, “that doesn’t enter into your philosophy.”

“No,” said Magnus directly. “To me the greatness of America is that it is not American. It has the whole world in it and, as long as these world elements remain distinctly defined in their inherited traditions, just so long America remains the natural Parliament of Man.”

“The little Sassenach,” said a voice out of the night. “Damned if I don’t hope a submarine gets us.”

Brinsmade laughed.

“Thanks, friend,” he said. “I feel almost that way, myself.”

“Whether you like it or not, it is so to-day,” said Magnus, “and the reason that internationalism will come as an American doctrine is just that. We are international, and not in a hundred years can we be anything else. This to you may seem abhorrent, but to me it is the greatest destiny that could come to us. You would wipe out our links to other nations. I say, keep them; do nothing to weaken them, and make them great bonds of political thought, that America may lead the world.”

“What gets me--and by George, it does get me--” Brinsmade blurted out, “is your assumption to speak for my country. Good heavens; my family fought in three wars, and you have been here twenty years and tell me what America is, and--damn it--the worst is, I believe you do know!”

“Yes, Mr. Brinsmade, I do,” said Magnus quietly. “What do you know of the great East Side of New York? What do you know of how multitudes think and act,--the great labor organizations, the I. W. W? What do you know of what you call the foreign press? Do you know that there are over four hundred newspapers published in a foreign tongue--German, French, Italian, Swedish, Jewish and Hungarian--and that they represent a circulation of millions? The foreign element that was born abroad, or whose parents were born abroad, represents twenty millions; you represent a dwindling minority. You represent--we are talking frankly--an insular element, and the strange thing is that you still persist in seeing America in that spirit of nationalism which existed in Revolutionary days. America has passed beyond such limitations, and you don’t realize it.”

“And this from a man who came to my country twenty-five years ago!”

“But who has, perhaps, a greater vision of your country’s mission in world affairs than you have,” retorted Magnus.

“You are probably right,” said Brinsmade. “You place crudely things that are coming into my mind and the minds of others like me. Probably we are not awake. Have we, the old American strain, lost our inheritance?” He added, as if to himself, “And if so, is it our fault?”

Up the deck a spear of light shot across the night from an open door. A group of young men, emerging from the card room for a breath of air, came shuffling down the deck, singing as they came.

I was drunk last night, dear mother;
I was drunk the night before,
And if I live till to-morrow,
I’ll be--

“Hello there--Littledale!”

I cursed them mentally and returned an uninviting grunt.

“Hello.”

“Counting the submarines?”

Four figures loomed at the foot of my chair.

“Some games running up there! Four tables. Better take a hand.”

Farther up the line of chairs, a child, awakened by their coming, began to cry.

“Not to-night. And say, if you want to make a night of it, you fellows, tramp the upper deck. People want to sleep down here.”

“Yes, Captain,” said a laughing voice; but another said, “Shut up, Limpy. The women are round here. Come on: clear out.”

The sound of their heavy tramp died out in the distance. A woman behind me sat up, rearranged her pillow, and settled back. The child whimpered sleepily and then grew quiet. In the distance some one began to snore. The ship had begun a slight roll, as it fled, ghostlike in a ghostly night, followed by noises of unseen things; the hiss of hidden waves, a sudden leap of spray, the creak of pulleys, a stifled whistle, and the rumble of the invisible force that thrust it forward.

Magnus laughed.

“Your American inheritance; there it is!”

“Damned if I can listen to any more of that!”

I rose abruptly, kicking the rugs from my legs, and went down the deck. I am, I suppose, too young not to resent unwelcome arguments with a hot intolerance. Socialism had meant to me little more than a name, which I rejected on faith as something akin to anarchy. The voice of the immigrant, speaking for my America, roused in me a blind rebellion. The more so that, while he had cut across every traditional instinct, I was at a loss in the poverty of my mental experience to answer the coldly stated propositions which, despite my will, convinced me of some measure of their truth. Yet what had he done but state in his own words thoughts which had been in my own mind; yes, even those opinions which had been surging uppermost,--that, in the coming test of a changed democracy, my generation had let slip the leadership that was its by inherited responsibility. I could say this to myself, yet I could not brook it from another. Why? Perhaps Mr. Brinsmade was right, and in the conflicts of man to man there is no antagonism so deep-rooted, so unreasoning, so obedient to inherited repulsions, as that antagonism which in the field of ideas has led men to persecute, to torture and to stamp out one another with the fury of unreasoning beasts.

Of this reflection I was not then conscious. I felt only the resentment of the man of action for the man of thought. It was not the ideas, but the ideas in the mouth of Peter Magnus which aroused my fury. I remember standing a long time forward, sheltering myself behind a bulging canvas which slapped against its chains with windy explosions, trying to shake off my ill-humor, until the cold cut of the spray which hissed over the decks brought back some equanimity.

IV

I went inside. The sofas in the ladies’ saloon had been turned into beds. Most of the women had already put on their life preservers and were surrounded by impossible mounds of baggage. An old man was methodically deploying a pack of cards at a table. A woman, with a child on her shoulder, was staring open-eyed at the ceiling. Outside on the landing two returning sailors and a nursemaid were whispering with sudden outbursts of mirth,--Americans all, Yankee, Westerner, Scandinavian, Latin and Asiatic.

I went upstairs and into the foul thickness of the smoking room, where the shock of my entrance set the layers of gray fumes to twisting and coiling about the dim lamps. Groups had already formed at the corner tables; Hungerford and the younger men, a solemn audience about a chess match; another group near me--officers of two torpedoed freighters--were swapping yarns as they played.

“Got ours out of Genoa, just after dawn.”

“Trouble getting away?”

“Shelled us right up to the last minute.”

A little woman, wife of the speaker, broke into a light laugh.

“Kept on shellin’, too, when we got the boats clear. Dan here, he says to me, ‘Sarah, you stand right up and let ’em see there’s a woman in the boat.’ So I stood up, and crack, they let go with a shot that jumped the bonnet from my head. Polite, aren’t they?”

“Don’t tell that at home: they’ll say you ex--aggerate!” said a large, swarthy man, who was shuffling the cards. “Civilized folks don’t do such things; that’s what they’ll say!”

“Well, Sarah and I ain’t got no kick coming,” said the skipper philosophically. “We got away with six trips and landed the last cargo, too. Risky--but big money, and I guess we’re on easy street for a while.”

“Say, if this war goes on another year, boy, we’ll have all the money in the world.”

A short, stockily built young fellow, keen as a vulture, derby pushed back, removed a fat cigar and nodded to his neighbor, a type of world peddler, Armenian or Levantine, who was chewing a toothpick in a drowsy interest.

“All the money in the world! And after? Say--I’ve been over cleaning up _some_ contracts, believe me; but that’s nothin’ to what’s comin’--nothin’! Say--when this little war’s over, any fellow who’s got somethin’ to sell is goin’ to cash in so fast a crooked gamblin’ wheel won’t be in it.”

“Oh, got a pretty good line, myself.”

“You have, eh? What?”

“Antiques.”

“Pretty soft bargains, eh?”

The Levantine smiled contentedly. And the two, suddenly attracted, moved into a corner, absorbed by their own bright conceptions of the future.

“Hello, there, Big Dale. Ship ahoy!”

I sauntered over curiously to where Hungerford was ensconced in the midst of congenial spirits.

“Have a hand?”

“No, thanks.”

“Have a drink?”

“Not now.”

I had sat through just such all-night sessions in the days when such feats were regarded as title to man’s estate, but to-night the mood was foreign to my own.

“Shake hands with my old friend, ‘Gyp, the Blood,’ alias Frangipani,” said Hungerford, whose good humor was proof against hunger, drowsiness, the cold gray dawn and stale tobacco. “Mr. Frangipani was _not_ a professor of English at Columbia.”

“How be you, friend? Seen you on the deck,” said a stocky, square fellow in ambulance uniform, who gave me a drowsy squint from around a knobby nose and put out a squatty hand which was minus a finger. “Not drinkin’?”

“Thanks, no. The atmosphere is strong enough,” I answered, wondering in what strange by-ways of civilization--tramp steamer, traveler of the underworld, or ranger of the Western prairies--the man had gone his careless journey.

“Mr. Tooker, of Tookerville, Mississippi, sah. Mr. Tooker is a close student of our great national game.”

“Very glad to know you, Mr. Littledale,” said a brisk little fellow, sober, well-groomed, soft-voiced, alert and smiling. “Heard a good deal about you.”

“Mr. Galligan, of Walla Walla. Mr. Galligan is returning from his period of rest at the front to get a little excitement in the Coeur d’Alene district,” said Hungerford, who was in good spirits.

A powerful, big-framed youth, with bullet head, blue eyes and thin lips, who had been making desperate attempts at keeping his eyes open, yawned, and said thickly:

“’Scuse me. Had a ---- of a night in Bordeaux. Glad to know you.”

“_And_ Professor Ralph Waldo William Butler Swinburne Southwick, of Harvard, and Beacon Street, and the American Ambulance.”

Southwick, in his precipitation to shake hands, dropped his glasses, which slid from his long, delving nose and dangled back and forth on their short string, overturned a pile of chips, and started to take up the discards, under a storm of protests.