Chapter V: Part II: I (2)

“Other members of the original Inter-Allied Poker Club have succumbed to poison gas, auto-intoxication, and the need of a recumbent position,” continued Hungerford, with a wave of his hand toward two figures on the couches, who had passed beyond the stage of introductions. He paused and indicated a large, bulbous figure under a sombrero, snoring peacefully in a sitting position at his side. “The late Mr. Honus Scroff, of Tittle Valley, Arizona. Mr. Scroff is especially delighted to meet you,” he added, lifting the hat from the red, cropped hair and freckled ears.

“Honus hasn’t been to bed since we started down,” said Galligan, gathering in the cards.

“Quite right. Mr. Scroff’s like an eight-day clock; he only has to sleep every Saturday night from 12 to 8.”

“Play ball!” said Frangipani loudly, throwing in an ante.

Scroff woke, blinked, and said thickly, “My deal?”

“Not yet, old top!”

“All right.”

And he went off to sleep again.

“I’m in,” said the professor colloquially. “Shove around the pasteboards.”

She did
And she didn’t;
She would
And she wouldn’t;
O-o-o-o-o! BUT--!

began Frangipani, in a long, doglike wail, which drew curses from the four corners of the room. The cards were dealt and the bets began.

I stood watching them quite a while, amused at their patter. They were real, as I had learned to value men in the rough-and-tumble of life. It was Young America relaxing,--the need of a young nation to return to its play, to blow off steam after months of driven dynamic energy. Quite barbaric at bottom, perhaps,--but so understandable, to me! I liked the democracy of the group and its unconscious camaraderie. Yet, I could not help thinking how unrelated we were to one another,--to the present or to the future. And, as I stood there studying them--in my mind the menace that Magnus had voiced--I wondered how long we could stem the moving forces below that had the solidarity and the energy of determined rebels.

* * * * *

To-night, as I recall this first conversation with Magnus, my irritation dies away. I am not sure but what he has but stated in his own antagonistic way things which have been growing over me.

Democracy was a revolt against the leadership of a class when that leadership had grown weak and was no longer natural and genuine. But, if democracy cannot produce its own real leadership--if it can do no more than set in motion a mob--the leadership of that mob will be the leadership that surges out of the accidents of a stampede.

V

Four bells rang from the forecastle when I returned to my chair on the lower deck. Brinsmade and Magnus were breathing heavily. I enclosed my legs in the rug, burrowed my nose in my great coat, and sought sleep. Disturbed by the bustle of my arrival, the young woman at my side stirred in her sleep and moaned. The dream passed into a nightmare for, struggling suddenly against some grim horror of unreality, she burst into a cry:

“_Ma mère! Ma mère,--oh non, pas ça!_”

The scream awoke a score of passengers. Out of the darkness voices cried excitedly:

“What’s happened?”

“Submarine?”

“Oh, my God!”

People began to rise and grope towards the cabins. I heard Brinsmade and Magnus struggling to their feet. Another moment, and a panic would have swept over us. I called out cheerily:

“Nothing wrong! Somebody’s got a bad dream; nothing else!”

Then I leaned over and caught the arm of the dreamer. She groaned, shivered, and sat up.

“A nightmare, Mademoiselle,” I said, loud enough to be heard down the deck. “All right now. Nothing wrong.”

She was sitting bolt upright, straining against the horror of the passing phantom.

“Pardon, Mademoiselle, for having taken your arm--it seemed best--you were evidently--” I stopped lamely, a prey to the diffidence I had felt in her presence from the first approach.

She had not moved.

“I hope I did not offend you--”

“No, no,” she said suddenly. “It was a dream--a terrible dream!”

Her voice was not yet under control. I waited, but having said this, she drew back into her silence. Presently, I heard her settling back into her chair. Quiet had returned to the deck. I sat there, keenly awake. The memory of her cry haunted me and, though the utter blackness prevented my seeing her, I had the feeling that she, too, was tremulously, nervously awake at my side.

* * * * *

Often have I wondered what makes us so blind to our own selves, and sometimes I think it is our insistence in seeing our lives as a logical development. We seek in all phases of life a working formula (formulas which are not knowledge but the substitute for knowledge) and we early adopt a formula about our own selves. We never see ourselves whole because, perhaps, we never complete our own image.

* * * * *

I know that I, too, am a slave to my own formula. I say to myself that I am an average man,--that, given a problem of action, I will do under given circumstances just what the average man will do; that, if I am better or worse, it is all in the quality of opportunity. I am influenced largely by the judgment my neighbors would pass on me--by a desire to maintain my own self-respect, or to return to it--and yet I am conscious of but a distant and imperfect acquaintance with this self which is my court of last judgment. And, when I have said all this, I am conscious that I have explained nothing,--that there is always at the bottom of myself some unpremeditated, rebellious impulse that in the moments of most determined progress towards a given point suddenly sends me blindly in another direction. What is that invisible, intangible sense? I obey by instinct something that I do not comprehend. I follow myself through changing phases and wonder at the instinct that brings me back to the level of common sense--as a ship in a storm struggles to right itself. I am here as I am to-day by some agency that mystifies me,--invisible forces from without, or some instinct from within. Yet as I look back I see no logical relation in the process.

* * * * *

That night, half-awake, half-adream, four figures passed before me, conjured up from the cauldron of my imagination, as the mystic sequence which greeted Macbeth.

The First: A boy, with the eyes of faith, believing in the good of the world, a scrubby, tousled little urchin, in and out of mischief, just beginning to penetrate beyond the borders of fairyland, passionately curious; a rich little mind exploring vast continents of treasured knowledge; a youngster who had already dared climb the magic walls of childhood and hesitated before the jump into the strange real world. What was I then? All of creation was within my imagination; society was expressed in three laws,--the rising bell, soap, and the Sunday prohibitions. The first two I comprehended (in my male’s instinct for order); the last I never did. What had happened to the world that periodically, at the end of each week, a sudden hush should fall in the household, that romping must cease and playthings be hidden away, and the body encased in starched shirts and shining black suits, and the young romping spirits should be led in leash to hard benches and the pointing finger. Father and mother were majestic, Olympian figures, never quite understood; authority was absolute, and the world black or white. My first love, a young lady of twenty years, was an angel stepping down out of the parted heavens, whose voice thrilled to the secret caverns of my heart. She stopped but a week at our home and I have never seen her since, yet in those short days I fell so desperately in love with her--greatest and most radiant of fairy princesses--that to this day I can feel my little heart stop as over the bed-covers I saw her come to my bedside, all fragrance and loveliness, to touch my eyelids with her lips. And then, they told me that she was to be married; that she had gone and I would see her no more. I remembered the child quivering under his first touch of sorrow, poignant and overwhelming. That first knowledge of sorrow, the utter loneliness, the incomprehension that such things could exist in the simplicity of the world! There was no refuge but in dreams and for months I lived for my dream,--for that moment when the candle wick glowed and dropped into the darkness and the shimmering stars came through the open window, and my dreams would begin anew, as out of the peopled dark, ogres and kings’ sons, Napoleons and presidents, Hercules and Ulysses, fairy godmothers and elves, and--always--the loveliest princess in the world came forth to fetch me into the fantasy of the future.

Sometimes now, thinking on that future, I wonder, should I have sons, if any of them will be as real to me as that boy. I think not. In the man, the first-born and the closest to his heart must ever be the boy that was. I see now that it was that first imagined sorrow which led me beyond the magic garden of childhood into the questioning of youth. There were nights, moonlit nights and starry nights, when I crept to my window and strove to pierce the riddle of the strange things above; when I stood and wondered and shivered, a little mind striving to penetrate the sky, pitting itself against Infinity. And, as I watched this young self there in the still of the covered night, I wondered. Now, I seldom dream or question: I have retreated behind my formulas. But what became of all the brave little thoughts, the fancy, the rich curiosity and the eagerness for first knowledge? Which is the true, abiding self,--this, or the pebble fashioned by the grinding, restless forces of Society?

* * * * *

Second Figure: A young man of twenty, outwardly disciplined, walking, talking, dressing like ten thousand other well-groomed, mechanical products of the educational factories; inwardly, a turbulent appetite for life, a mind which had stopped functioning, an imagination buried, but with every impulse and curiosity vibrantly awake. Never have I been surer of myself, and never was I more worked upon by forces which I did not understand; I, a high-strung young animal suddenly released into the pastures of youth. Everything appealed to me; every broad way and byway in the vast forest of life sent me galloping down it in exploration. Each impulse, good or evil, was genuine and irresistible. I adored one woman as a saint, blushed and stumbled in her presence, trembled at the contact of her fingers and, in the full flush of this puppy-love, could feel my blood surge at a brazen glance. I drank too much, gambled outrageously: yet it was not from any desire for ugliness, but from the sheer joy of wrestling with invisible outer forces, in a strange belief that I, a privileged being, could affront the gods of chance and bind them to my way. I dissipated a month’s allowance in a day; fell into deep periods of religious speculation; rebelled at dogma and constituted authority; rejected all that was old and followed everything that was new. All this I did as hungrily as I sat down at table, without knowing in the slightest why I did it. Yet this is not quite true. Already, I had begun to be conscious of a dual self, a self that acted and a self that watched. Often, I went madly towards an infatuation which would have meant the end of all things, knowing all the time the fatality of it, powerless to resist and saved only by some trick of circumstance. The truth was that my blood ran too rapidly in my veins, the delight in every sense was too imperious, the joy of being alive too intoxicating.

* * * * *

Still, in this period when everything was fermenting, fructifying, bubbling to the surface in me, my outlook was of the simplest. Black was still black, and white, white. Women were good or bad,--and both drew me to them. I broke the laws of society, but I believed in them, fully determined at some calmer, wiser period of my life to maintain and defend them. So, when I was most inconsistent, I had faith in inconsistency. I repented with the same ardor with which I transgressed.

I walked down the avenue, and my imagination took fire at the brilliant women in their speeding luxury. What did I feel? The need of exerting the supremacy of my youth over their shallow, sparkling little souls. I sat in a great Opera House and, before that insistent, imperious parade of society, dreamed of some future date when I who was now lost in the crowd would impose myself. Everything in me was force, faith, and desire, and all these young impulses tugged at my soul for the opportunity to express themselves. How confident, how wise, how convinced I was, and--I knew nothing. For, mentally, it was a period of arrested development, when I mistook hunger for strength, vanity for power, longing for capacity.

We are all, I suppose, more or less cases of arrested development. When a man ceases to inquire, to explore, and to wonder, when he is convinced of his knowledge, when he reaches the point where all his free and flexible opinions have settled into hardened convictions, at that moment his development is stopped, even as a little child whose mind cannot move beyond the A. B. C.

* * * * *

This was what I was in the days when all within me was but an appetite for life. What shook my equanimity and violently freed me of my self-complacency? The first contact with evil, the knowledge and the mysterious reaction.

* * * * *

Third Figure: A man approaching thirty, perhaps too near to be seen distinctly, and yet in such violent contrast that before its note of worldly knowledge boyhood and youth fled from the contact. I saw a man whose eyes had gone behind every scene, whose back had turned, he believed, on every illusion, tolerant of every frailty, amused at little hypocrisies and of those greater shams which an arrogant society imposes on the outsider and itself defies with impunity: steeped in this class cynicism, without realizing that in the strong nourishing forces of civilization this society is but the scum that rises to the surface and that in the old _pot-au-feu_ below are the vital nourishments of the race. I had come eagerly into the brilliant cosmopolitan society of Europe with enough money and proper credentials, and I had come as how many young men of imagination and fire before me, believing in pleasure as the goal of life, pleasure, which I had seen in my ardent nature as in youth one sees and believes in the painted beauties and the paste jewels behind footlights. I recoiled, I grew accustomed to what I at first resented. I shrugged my shoulders, and, in the end, I did as those I lived with did. In the unconscious progression is the whole story. I became a _flâneur_ of society. I knew the comedies and tragedies of a ballroom as an old collector on the _quais_ recognizes and smiles over the titles whose stories he knows. I lived a life of crowded inconsequences. The days and nights were consumed in doing--what to-day is a blank of years. But how my world had narrowed! The limitless horizons and starry spaces of childhood, even the mysterious depths of youth, had contracted into confines so narrow that my daily run of life was more provincial than that of a buried village. Why did I not go on in the paths of worldly wisdom, with a cynical weighing of actual values? Why did I not continue steadfast, as my logic showed me? The truth lay, perhaps, in the heart of a child that we men can never quite kill. The first impulse is the abiding impulse; if you would know the man, know the child.

It was in vain I told myself that only the living was vital, and that in a world of sceptics and pagans only the fools cling to compunctions. I repeated to myself that the sum of all moralities is in the instinct of the man to believe what he wants to believe. It brought me no calm. I did wrong, saying to myself that it was not wrong, and yet all the time I knew in my restlessness that it was wrong. Madame de Tinquerville instilled into my veins this mental corruption and yet, at the end, when I believed that I had accepted everything, a nausea seized me and I flung this self violently aside. Then the mobilization, and a new self.

* * * * *

Fourth Figure: I, myself,--if not the self of to-morrow, the self of to-day: an exile. For I had been that all these long embittered months,--an exile from all that life had been to me, a man grown suddenly taciturn, who smoked his pipe, lying in a mud hole behind a flap, and gazed up at the thin blue avenue of the trenches overhead; smoked, obeyed, questioned not, and was content to have found a meaning. Atavism, perhaps, the content to be just man again, following man’s instinct to survive among the fittest. I knew life as though I had been born to it again. Three times a day I thrilled with the delight of eating; I knew the ecstasy of sleep after fatigue; I wept at the loss of a comrade, and my whole heart rejoiced when in the exhaustion after battle with my closing vision I felt the rough hands of a convict drawing his coat over me with the tenderness of a woman. The world had no perplexities for me. The mask was discarded. I felt myself brute, Crusader, sinner, pagan and saint, and each mood was genuine. I saw men in the frenzy of combat swept into moments of unbelievable ferocity. I myself knew moments when there was nothing human in me, when courage was but the panic for existence. And out of the abnormal slaying self I would grope back into the man that reasoned over his actions and shivered at the animal that had run wild. I knew the pagan hour that comes so easily to those who have felt the breath of passing destruction continuously at their side. In the whirlpool and the whipping trenches I have seen my comrade at arms struck and strewn into unrecognizable matter and have felt but one instinctive thought:

“I live--I still live!”

Yet, later, in a more reasoning mood, deliberately and calmly, I have gone back as others went, into the certainty of destruction, to rescue a wounded stranger. I have returned with the living, singing, greedy of life,--a bed of hay paradise and a can of _Pinard_ the ecstasy of forgetfulness. I have rebelled, hesitated, been caught with the cold nausea of fear, thrilled at a word from a peasant boy kneeling and crossing himself, and awakened to the call of leadership which was mine by _noblesse oblige_, become suddenly and disdainfully impersonal when responsibility had fallen to me and I could do no less than the least. Other moments there were, when I walked, a lone sentry in the night, among the sleeping and the dead, when a feeling of reverence and awe possessed my soul at the slow revolving stars, and I wondered at the futility of victors and vanquished under the things that change not. I knew moments of intense intellectual clarity when my mind seemed to take wing and lift me above the soiled reality of conflict into a mystic sense of my own loneliness in the scheme of things. At such moments, when only the questioning remained, I had a disdain of danger and of the death which went unseen and whining in the night,--a disdain that was absolute. Yet in the morning, cramped in a dugout, I heard above me the great shells shatter and felt the cold sweat rise in my back. After this can the other life be real? I wonder. Or will all this pass into a dim incredible memory?

* * * * *

And so, through the long night, there on the hidden deck among those who waited and feared, next to the woman at my side, awake, too, with her memories, I saw my strange selves pass and wondered. Which was the nearest kin to the David of that hour? What new figure would come out of the future that was as impenetrable as the dark that wrapped me about?

VI

I think I must have gone off into a half-sleep, for all at once my eyes opened to gray and wavering shapes. The skeleton outline of the creaking ship grew out of the fluid dawn, figures of sleeping passengers rose out of the obscurity and across the rail glimmered the white curl of the clearing sea. My first instinctive impulse was to the woman at my side.

The veil had been thrown back; the long lashes lay on the brown cheek across which clung a spray of dark hair. The front of the rough Breton hood half concealed the clear rise of the forehead and soaring eyebrows, the fine delicacy of the high-bridged nose, the full and sensitive lips. One hand lay at her throat, a rosary entwined in her fingers and the silver flash of a crucifix. I thought then that I had never looked upon anything so gentle, so fragile, so pure. She was so far removed from the things of this heavy world that in her semi-recumbent position, I thought of some sculptured saint, asleep in an olden monastery.

Her eyes opened, rested in mine a full moment, read my thoughts, and dropped away. Instantly, she drew her veil, sat up, and averted her head. Within me everything grew troubled and confused. I rose hastily and went down the deck.

I can remember to this day the sudden timidity that overcame me always in her presence, the eagerness to speak to her, and the hesitancy whenever I found an excuse. In her, too, I see now, two impulses fought, for at times, in her instinct to repel me, she was brusque almost to the point of rudeness and her manner so determinedly antagonistic that I grew diffident as a boy. What had become of the man of the world? I, who prided myself on my knowledge of women, was as awkward in her presence, as helpless and at loss as the veriest schoolboy. I can remember that I had but one thought on awakening,--to do her some service. Yet when I had returned from below-decks with a thermos bottle of hot coffee I was utterly nonplussed for some pretext to approach her.

I came hesitantly down the strewn deck. The sky was graying rapidly now, as the dawn crept in chill and sickly. Astern, the low-huddled funnels of our escort,--guardian of our night. Brinsmade and Magnus had wakened and gone below. The lady with the child was sitting up, rearranging her veil. A sudden inspiration came to me. I stopped and made my offer.

“A drop of hot coffee, Madame?”

She took it, smiling and grateful, refusing a second cup. I breathed more freely, for I felt I had removed all personal emphasis. I passed on.

“Won’t you also, Mademoiselle, have a bit of coffee? It’s a long way to breakfast.”

Yet, as I said this, I had a sudden weak feeling of intruding, and I looked away from her for fear she would read beneath the studied impersonality of my tone. Behind the veil, I felt a moment of hesitation.

“If you will hold the bottle, I will get some clean glasses.”

When I returned, I brought a box of crackers, taking the precaution to offer them along the way. This action evidently disarmed her prejudices, for she had drawn her veil when I came to her chair. I poured a full glass.

“But you, Monsieur?”

“Oh, I’ve had my cup, below. Take it--you need it. I’m afraid you had a bad night.”

She took the glass but made no answer. When I referred to the night, her gray-eyed glance rose to my face, rested a furtive moment in thoughtful inquiry, and retreated; but the moment was not one of embarrassment or hesitation, but rather of a settled attitude of aloofness.

“There is just a little more.”

“Some one else, then.”

I poured out what remained and handed it to her, pressing her acceptance.

“Thank you--no more.”

She drew on her glove, lowered her veil, and sank back once more.

Feeling a certain irritation that in this first clash of authority she should have resisted, I sat down.

“To-morrow morning I’ll be better provided.”

“To-morrow? We spend another night on deck?” she said, in surprise.

“That’s orders. But you don’t obey orders,” I said, glancing at the deck. “Orders are to bring your life belt, and you’ve not done it.”

“No--I didn’t think of it.”

“You are not afraid?”

“Afraid? Of that?” she said slowly. She shook her head and I wondered at the look behind her veil.

The tone in which it was said, coupled with the memory of that meeting on the upper deck, thrilled me. I sought to make her talk, to establish a natural acquaintance, through no forward curiosity but out of a genuine sympathy. Yet I was so keenly aware of the bar which her traditions interposed that I waited a long moment before I had courage to say:

“Mademoiselle, I hope you will forgive my presumption of last night.”

“Presumption?”

“Yes, it was that. I hope you did not misunderstand my action.”

She turned.

“I did not misunderstand that, no,” she said reluctantly, for I was forcing her into a conversation against her will, “and yet, why should you have done it?”

“Mademoiselle,” I said, surprised at the quickening of my pulses, “I have done what little I could to help, because I love your people. I have lived among sorrow and terror. Am I not allowed to understand, and try to help, just--because it is one of my own kind?”

She did not reply at once. I felt that her eyes were on me.

“You Americans have kind hearts, Monsieur, and I thank you again.”

To this day I can remember the thrill of pleasure that came to me with the first softening of her voice, that first note which told me that in her eyes I was no longer just one of the passing crowd.

“I know how a young girl is brought up in France,” I began hurriedly--

“We are no young girls now, Monsieur. There are only women in France.”

The voice was back into the measured, impersonal tone.

I looked at her, amazed, started to speak and stopped. I understood that I should gain nothing by forcing a conversation, and though every instinct urged me to remain near her, I rose to withdraw.

“May I present myself, Mademoiselle, since we are to be companions for a while? I am Mr. David Littledale.”

She bowed in acknowledgment but made no answer, and I went down the deck with a stirring uneasiness at the awkwardness which it seemed to me I had displayed in every word and action. Later in the day I found a card on her chair. The name was like herself, a veil thrown up against my curiosity.

“Mademoiselle Renée Duvernoy.”

VII

An ocean steamer is a great university of the world. Infinity of sea and sky bring an incredulity of the defined land, where strange human beings move under precise conventions to the tyranny of what is or is not done. For me the comprehensible world was but this speck of wood, swinging between water and sky. The salt democracy of the sea and the common sense of danger run quickened our senses and let down the barriers of our Anglo-Saxon restraint.

Yet of all those who crowded the decks the one woman who interested me most defied all my attempts at friendship. Beyond the unconventionality of our first meetings on the dock and by the upper rail I had been unable to progress. Indeed, all her attitude indicated a studied resolve to retreat from the memory of that accidental intimacy. Her greeting each morning was gracious. She allowed me to arrange her pillows and wrap her solicitously in her steamer rugs.

“Monsieur, I thank you; you are very kind.”

She said it gravely, with a slight acknowledgment of her head, but her tone remained impersonal and she conveyed to me, without possibility of misunderstanding, that her privacy was to be respected, and it was not until I had gone off for a tramp of the decks or had turned into the constant discussion which ran on between Magnus and Brinsmade that she drew her veil and picked up her book. The book was but a pretext. For hours she held it before her without the turning of a page.

At times, I pretended to go off into long siestas, studying her furtively in short examinations. For despite every precaution, if my glance remained on her too long, she became aware of it and, if I persisted, she retired behind her veil.

This very reserve stirred my curiosity. My imagination was drawn to the mystery I divined of some inner conflict beneath the precise formality of her outer manner. Her slightest action became to me the important record of my day. I studied her and wondered. There were hollows in her cheek that should not have gone with her years. Often in the warm, impulsive lips I detected the set droop of long fatigue, while about the eyes, which remained long moments lost in the healing distance, I felt the still quivering lines of remembered pain. She seemed so out of place that, with the memory of my own exile, I felt intuitively the struggle of a soul brutally torn from its protecting affections and forced by the tragic hazards of war to struggle for readjustment and the right to go on living. I felt this and yet I could not intrude. About her, in everything she did, in every word she uttered, was an authority I could not but respect.

Her day was measured in an unvarying routine. She came from breakfast, walked alone for an hour, took to her chair and read, with long periods of abstracted contemplation, until a glance at her watch apprised her of the time for another turn of the deck.

When she walked, it was without movement of the hips or shoulders, her elbows to her sides, with a curious erect and measured grace, as our grandmothers used to walk,--when our grandmothers were straight and slender. Her step was light and leisurely, without purpose. She paused often, leaning against the rail, to gaze into the western distances, before resuming her pensive strolling. In the afternoon, particularly at the stealing in of the dusk, I saw her turn to her prayer-book. Then she became so absorbed that she forgot my presence completely, lifted into regions where I could not follow.

The method, the dryness, the precision of this routine would have convinced me were it not for a memory,--the cry of the woman in her loneliness on the upper deck. With that memory in mind, I felt from the first the struggle and the conflict,--two natures contending within her; or rather that, with some determined resolve before her, as a novice about to renounce the world, she was striving to impose upon herself a discipline, mental and moral, which was not in the ardent and impulsive rebellion of her temperament.

The short word of greeting, the punctilious farewell at night, in a manner grave, restrained, and without a smile, were all so carefully adjusted to the most obvious civilities that I despaired of ever penetrating her reserve. Yet when the opportunity came it came as naturally as it was unexpected.

* * * * *

Among the few children was a boy of five or six who enjoyed great popularity among the passengers. The child, attracted to Mademoiselle Duvernoy by childhood’s instinct to those who have borne pain, passed and repassed a dozen times a day before her chair, seeking by every artifice to catch her eye.

The fourth morning out, when we were stretched languidly in our steamer chairs, Master Jack, enveloped in leggings, sweater and muffler, wabbled down like a rolling ball of cotton and, after the usual preliminary skirmishes, rallying his courage, stopped directly between our chairs and said timidly:

“How do?”

The piping voice startled her from her mechanical contemplation. She dropped her book and her body seemed to shrink back.

“I talk to you a little while--yes?”

The smile of the young suppliant would have won over a jury, yet to my surprise she did not unbend and the greeting was forced and perfunctory.

“Good-morning.”

Determined, the youngster sidled up and stood gazing in adoration.

“Why you wear that ugly veil all the time?”

As he asked the question, the childish fingers fastened and turned about her wrist, while the young eyes grew big with sympathy. I saw her arm draw hastily back from the contact. Then, after a moment, as though obeying a superior determination, it came forward slowly and reluctantly.

“The veil is not ugly.”

The tone, the action, the undefined look with which she stared at him, impressed the child. A serious expression came over his face,--a look of trying to understand something beyond his ken.

“Is it because you are so very sad?” he said softly.

I felt her panic before the child’s innocent directness and that in her helplessness she turned to me.

“Come here, Jack the Giant Killer,” I said, catching him up and swinging him through the air to plant him firmly on my lap. “How old are you? Where are you going? What makes the steam white, the water wet, and why does the wind sing? Do you know all that?”

“Why is the water wet?” said the youngster.

“You don’t know? Goodness--neither do I!”

The child, with his eyes still on Mademoiselle Duvernoy, extended a pudgy forefinger.

“Is she your sister?”

“No, young man: and Mademoiselle Duvernoy is not my daughter, nor my cousin, aunt or wife,” I said hastily, with a fear of coming questions. “And if you will promise, solemnly promise, not to ask another question, I’ll tell you the story of ‘Puss-in-Boots’.”

“I know ‘Puss-in-Boots’!”

“Well, ‘Cinderella and the Glass Slipper’.”

“I know ‘Cinderella’.”

“Well, what don’t you know?”

“I like the story of the Bears,” said the youngster decidedly.

“Humph! Now, that is funny,” I said, to gain time, for my memory was not of the clearest. To save the situation, I decided to improvise. “That is funny, because,--do you know, that reminds me of myself and my brothers. What do you think they called us? ‘Big Dale, Little Dale, Weeny Dale, and No Dale at All’!”

“You look like a bear,” said the youngster gravely.

“So they say. Well, once upon a time there was a little girl,--a very little girl, with the most wonderful golden hair in the world. She was called--”

“Snow-White!”

“Not at all. Golden-Locks. Well, one day, Golden-Locks went out walking in the woods, and she saw the most wonderful butterfly in the world, with diamonds glittering on its wings. She went on and on, following the diamond butterfly, until all at once she came to a little river that was flowing milk; but that wasn’t the strangest thing--”

“No?” said Master Jack, with round eyes.

“No. On the opposite side was a house,--all made of gingerbread; but that wasn’t the strangest thing.”

“No?”

“No. She went inside, and there, on the table, were five white plates.”

But here Master Jack sat up in protest.

“How could there be five plates, when there is only three Bears?”

“Three? Who said there were only three Bears? There were five Bears in the story.”

“Three!”

“Five. The story of the Five Bears. Don’t I know?”

“Wasn’t there only three Bears?” said Master Jack, who had caught the now amused glance of Mademoiselle Duvernoy.

“Three--yes.”

“There--you see!” exclaimed the youngster. “And--and wasn’t she called Snow-White?”

“She was.”

“There!”

“Then they’re not the same Bears,” said I, in pretended wrath. “My Bears are American Bears. There was Father Growler and Mother Gruff--that makes two--and Grumble Bear and Guzzle Bear--and that makes four--and then there was Tinkle Bear--”

“That makes five!”

“I resign,” I said, with tremendous dignity. “Tell it your own way.”

But instead of protests and capitulation, the critic stood to his colors.

“You don’t tell it at all the right way,” said the prejudiced public in the person of Master Jack. “You put in things that don’t belong. You tell it?” he said, suddenly turning to Mademoiselle Duvernoy, who had been smiling at my perplexity.

“Oh, but Mr. Littledale tells it very well.”

“You tell it yourself, and I’ll correct you,” I said, laughing.

The issue was settled by Master Jack who, with a sudden wriggle, transferred himself to the other chair. I rose to reclaim the truant, who had snuggled up to her shoulder, but she shook her head.

“No, no, he can stay.”

Her arms closed about the fluffy rascal, and she began.

“Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Snow-White, who lived with her father, a wood-chopper, in the woods--”

The youngster nodded, satisfied, glancing at me from time to time with malicious triumph as the narration ran along classic lines. Her voice was low, warmed with tenderness, and with the serio-comic pantomime of the story there came into her face a new light, all gentleness. I bent forward, listening to the melody of the voice without attention to the narrative, my eyes fixed on the mobile, fugitive expressions of her face. Why had she resisted the child at first,--shrinking from his touch? And, why this sudden melting?

“And the enchanted Prince came out and married Snow-White, and they lived happily, ever and ever after!”

But only half of the audience heard her. Master Jack was fast asleep.

“I thought I made up a very good story,” I said hurriedly, fearing the opportunity would pass.

“You see, fairy stories are better each time they are told over--and that’s why they must always be kept the same.”

We lowered our voices.

“I thought for a moment you--” I caught myself. “I beg your pardon; I was going to ask you a personal question, and I know you don’t like that.”

“You thought I disliked children, didn’t you?” she asked.

“Why, yes--”

“It was not that. Memories--” She checked herself, frowning.

“Of course. I understand,” I said hurriedly, as I saw the old expression of sadness cloud her face. “I am sorry. Don’t you want me to take the youngster? He is rather heavy.”

“No, no, please.”

I felt opportunity slipping from me.

“Mademoiselle Duvernoy, it must seem strange to you, a French girl, brought up as you were, to realize this freedom of the sea?”

She turned to me in astonishment.

“What do you know about the way I have been brought up, Monsieur?” The tone was a return to the old formality. Yet her eyes, in the brief second they met mine, had a certain fugitive alarm.

“I have lived in France. I know the ways of your people, and I have been privileged to know many of your old families. I am certain we have acquaintances in common, of the Faubourg St. Germain; and I know how rigidly the daughters are brought up.”

She frowned and shook her head decisively.

“You are quite mistaken about me. I have come to America to earn my own living.”

The tone in which she said it was imperative, set and admitting no debate.

“If you are a Frenchwoman, coming to my country, in whatever way, I hope I may be honored by your friendship.”

“But, Monsieur,” she retorted, in a gentler tone, “I don’t see how you and I can touch at any point; our ways are entirely different; and my traditions do not permit me to make chance acquaintanceships. Pardon me for saying this frankly to you, but it is a question of pride.”

I felt the door had been firmly closed in my face. Why such a rebuff, when every instinct in me had been but of kindness? I was hurt, and my manner showed it. I turned stiffly, and, sinking back in my chair, returned to my book. Master Jack woke up and departed in search of a tray of cookies.

“Mr. Littledale,--please?”

I looked up so hastily that the book slipped from my hands and tumbled to the deck.

“I did not mean anything to offend you. You won’t be offended, will you?”

“Why, just for a moment, I wasn’t quite sure--” Such a clear feeling of joy rose in me, after the blank discouragement of a moment before, that I cried out:

“Good heavens, no; of course, I won’t!”

She looked at me a little shyly and then away, hesitating, and I feared I had frightened her away again with my tactless impulsiveness. However, after a moment, she turned to me.

“You were in the Legion, Monsieur?”

“Yes, Mademoiselle.”

“Long?”

“I went in with the mobilization.”

“May I ask why you, an American, did that?”

“I could not help myself. It was so much bigger than anything else that had come into my life.”

She thought this over a moment and then nodded as though pleased.

“Ah, yes--the mobilization. It made us very proud of our old French race.”

“It made me proud of my fellow beings!”

“You--an American--felt that?”

“Particularly because I was an American,” I found myself saying, with great warmth. “Oh, I do not sentimentalize war. I have lived it.”

“You do not see it as only brutalizing, as that book ‘Gaspard,’ of which we are so much ashamed?”

“No, if that were the only side, France would not be living to-day.”

“Thank you, Monsieur,” she said, in sudden friendliness.

“The truth is in neither point of view. We cannot say that war ennobles or brutalizes mankind. I have thought about this much, and this is what I think: the man who is fundamentally a brute is made more brutal; the man who has in him a spark of nobility, even unsuspected, is lifted up. What war does is to search our souls and discover the ultimate truth. You see, in times of peace, we all more or less wear a mask for our neighbors. Well, when you’ve once gone into the trenches, that all disappears: you find out what you believe. When all may be over at any moment, you do what you want to do. And the strange thing is that each respects the other’s point of view.”

“I think there is one thing you have left out,” she said, after a moment’s thought.

“What is that?”

“The question of leadership. When he who leads is simple and high of heart, the _poilu_ always responds.”

“Yes, that is true, absolutely true.”

“War is a time when the leader is everything, isn’t it?” She thought a moment, and added, with a little weariness in her voice: “That is why I think, no matter what the hideous suffering that comes, it does set us right and turn us from false leaders.”

At this moment Hungerford came up and, much to my chagrin, I was forced to present him, cutting short our first conversation.

VIII

Her behavior with Hungerford puzzled me. There was not a trace of the calculated reserve which dominated all our meetings and to which, if for a moment she forgot herself, she inevitably returned. A little jealousy sprang up in me, for I was quite blind then to the real reason. I felt that in me there was some lack of spontaneous appeal to a woman. Before the irresistible good spirits of the younger man I felt a heaviness of experience and wondered why in all my attempts at friendship I should be so constantly saying the things that sent her into the shell of her reserve, when she would listen with her grave smile to Joe’s amusing patter. I was blind, indeed, and though I took pains to hide it, I was weakly hurt at this unconscious camaraderie with another.

She consented to our accompanying her in her walks when Joe assumed it as a matter of course, though she did refuse, and I remember it with a secret delight, to permit him the privilege alone. Here again her personality dominated us. When Hungerford, with the free and easy catch-as-catch-can manner of the younger generation, started to assume possession of her arm, she disengaged herself quietly, and said:

“Messieurs, if you will offer me _your_ arms.”

Any one but Hungerford would have been discountenanced. As it was, though he was a bit flustered, he gave her an exaggerated sweep of his hat.

“Style Louis XIV, Marquise!”

And, with her hands resting lightly on our arms, we adapted our impulsive strides to the leisurely grace of her choosing. Whatever her reason for assuming the name and position she did (I had never believed in it from the first), it was by such little things as this that she betrayed the quality of her breeding. Brinsmade and Peter Magnus were drawn to her instinctively, and often in the long afternoons we formed a circle of animated discussion. The opportunities to talk to her alone were rare and always she avoided them. When I did find a moment’s intimacy it was always to be made aware of the ever present sadness back of her eyes and the weight of some oppressing memory.

* * * * *

The afternoon after her first introduction to Hungerford, a curious incident happened, which, to this day, remains inexplicable to me. For neither of us ever after referred to it.

We were walking the upper deck, under the open sky, the crisp tingling air setting our cheeks to glowing. Despite herself, she was smiling at Hungerford’s whimsical instructions on American society, while I, feeling a little out of it, walked silently at her side, wondering at the ease with which Joe had plunged into her acquaintance.

“And remember, in America, a young lady of fashion, who is properly brought up, never marries until she has had a dozen proposals.”

“Never?”

“Never. It isn’t done. Oh, American girls are brought up to take care of themselves! When she is bored, do you think she waits for the men to come round? Not at all: she goes to the ’phone and says: ‘Jack, come up and take me out to dinner and a show; I want to be amused’.”

“And she pays the bill?” said Mademoiselle Duvernoy innocently.

“The what?”

“The bill.”

“Mademoiselle--I am living in hopes--”

At this moment a gust of wind caught a large woman and bore her down the deck, screaming for help. Hungerford dashed ahead, while we, sheltering ourselves in the lee of a lifeboat, stood laughing at the difficulties of the rescue. A sailor passed us and then a boy, carrying a pot of grease, slipped, and, to save himself, caught at my arm. When I had righted him, I saw such an expression of astonishment on his face as he gazed at Mademoiselle Duvernoy that I said, still laughing:

“I say, this young fellow seems to know you.”

“_Eh, Bonne Dame; que c’est notre Mamzelle!_”

She turned, and her face went blank: then, recovering herself, she said something rapidly in the Breton dialect which I could not understand. The effect was instantaneous. The boy drew up straight, snatched off his cap, and with marks of great respect backed away.

“Take my arm,” I said, going to her instantly.

She made no resistance and once as we started she swayed against my side. We crossed the deck and I found her a seat where she was sheltered from sight. There was no mistaking the effect on her. The lips were twitching, and the lines under her staring eyes were quivering with a haunting pain.

“Don’t try to speak. Don’t worry. No one saw you--not even I. Do you understand?”

“Monsieur--” She tried to speak and then put her hand to her throat.

“Don’t try to explain. Believe me, it isn’t necessary.”

She looked up at me, weak and shaken, and for the first time that I remembered her eyes held mine in a long, searching, mute appeal.

“But you will think--”

“Let me be your friend that far, Mademoiselle,” I said impulsively. “Trust me. I have forgotten.”

Hungerford swung around the deck and stopped short.

“Hello. What’s wrong?”

“Too much motion, you unfeeling brute, or perhaps the sight of your gyrations.”

I sent him for a chair and rugs, which gave her time to regain her self-control. Then I tucked her away in a sheltered corner, without opposition. She was stunned and did not seem to notice my presence for the long hour during which I religiously kept my eyes from her face, turning my back and staring over the driven waves. Later she called to me in a voice still weak and I helped her to the lower deck. The incident remained in my memory, obsessing it, deepening the film of mystery which had been about her from the first.

IX

I think the thing that impelled me irresistibly to Mademoiselle Duvernoy was the directness and order of her character. I knew that as she was, she had always been, and that no future temptation could ever alter for a moment her clear perception of her own high ideals. In fact, I could not conceive of any such thing as temptation even entering her life. To me, in my own consciousness of my turbulent, shifting existence and my distrust of to-morrow, it brought me a sense of cathedral calm to be privileged to sit at her side and listen. I had not the slightest thought what was awakening in me, so simple, so natural and so unpremeditated was my impulse towards her. Gradually, a sense of well-being and light-heartedness came to me, for now, while I was still aware of her struggling against me, I was also aware of her yielding. With each morning’s greeting I felt the night’s determination to relegate me into the safe distance of the crowd. Yet I had but to conquer the disappointment of her first manner and possess my soul in patience, to have her turn to me in a new friendliness. At first I talked, and she listened, gravely and attentively. I spoke of impersonal things, of memories of trenches and hospital, of my intellectual unrest and philosophic speculations. She answered me shortly, or by a question led me to find my own solution, but it was not until we were three days from port that she revealed her own thoughts and Peter Magnus was the occasion. I had been speaking of my reluctance to return home and my fear of the indifference to war I should find.

“You are never very tolerant, are you?” she said pensively.

“No, I suppose not,” I said, rather surprised at her reading my character. “And yet you who are French surely must understand the longing I have to love my own country.”

“My country has been centuries in the making. Our memories are long. In every family some one has died that France might remain France. We are an old race. We have lived together, been proud together, suffered together, a long while. That does not come in a day.”

“No, of course not.”

I must have shown in my sudden abstraction something of the indecision in my mind for, to my surprise, a note of friendly sympathy came into her voice.

“Mr. Littledale, I am afraid you are going to be unhappy, just at first. You hope for too much. Don’t be impatient. How can your people know what we know? You will learn, as we learned, to stand together--by suffering.”

At this moment, the voice of Peter Magnus broke in on our new mood.

“Then, you are glorifying war; you’ve come to that. Admit it.”

Brinsmade rose from his rugs and stood before us with an expression of utter helplessness.

“Here is a man who has been three months in France and brings back nothing but war is horrible. What am I to do with him?”

Peter Magnus ensconced himself in Brinsmade’s chair, so that we formed a group. He took off his hat and ran his hands through his hair, which was like a mane.

“When you speak of the glory of war,” he said, addressing Mademoiselle Duvernoy directly, “I see only the women in black, the cripples, the men who will grope in blindness, the station filled with the agony of parting, the homes swept by sorrow. Glory! Where is the glory in it, if you do not wear a crown? No, no, war is horrible, unthinkable!”

“Yet war is as inevitable a condition to a nation as death is to a human being,” she said quietly. “And is death so horrible?”

We three, of differing degrees of agnosticism, looked at her, struck with the boldness of the thought. It was Magnus who broke out:

“Yes, horrible! Death is horrible!”