Chapter VIII: Part III: I (1)

The rest is a blur. Clear and definite as is every moment from my first meeting with Bernoline to the last faint flutter of her white hand, the rest of the day is confused. There are hours which are lost, during which I do not know what I did or where I wandered. The great city roared about me. I walked interminable miles along dark, echoing side streets and into sudden flaming thoroughfares, where rapid crowds descended upon me like gusts of wind. I can remember the tap-tap of my cane along some stony solitude, and again standing at Times Square, in a wilderness of lights, roared at, amid the clanging and the honking of traffic; crowded, jostled, buffeted in the polygot stream,--a stranger in the land of his fathers.

Those crowds--those hostile, unintelligible crowds, so triumphantly successful--shall I ever forget them! I had known the monastic multitudes of Paris, slow-moving, reticent, respectful of the black-garbed mourners, compassionate and grim, hiding neither their sorrows nor their sympathy. I had known them and felt at home in them. But this other thing; this strident influx of strange tongues, this pagan riot, this shrill pursuit of pleasure, when all the world was hushed and apprehensive! What did they understand? What could they be made to understand? I stood, bewildered--I who had come for my American heritage--more alone, more distant than when in the long days of convalescence the dread feeling of homesickness gripped my heart.

If this were America, it was the America that Peter Magnus saw, polygot, cosmopolitan, international, an America that might be roaring on to some greater world-significance, but an America that had left me behind.

* * * * *

My room was on the eighteenth floor of a great hotel flung above the electric city. Below me swam the theatric night, the fluid effulgence of Broadway, the piping thrum of automobiles, the revelry ascending from flaring restaurants, carried upward into hanging gardens floating on the night,--nervous, shifting sheets of electric transparencies, fantastic, ingenious, unescapable, a million splendors to exalt a corset or a soap! What a vast, illuminated billboard! Everything oppressed me, the staggering scale of things, the importance of unimportant things, this capture of the night by the materialism of the day. I watched it, as one stands before the unleashed torrents of the sea and sky, overwhelmed with my own shrunk significance.

In the morning my first movement was to my window. The city of the night was fled. Below me lay a shanty civilization. The fairy splendor, the figment of the night had dissolved with the dawn. Broadway was but a huddled group of puny shanties, with skeleton trickeries exposed in the pitiless light of the day; ugly, visible, naked,--an adventuress stealing home at dawn, rouged, powdered and wan, and the pretentious jewels of the night showing themselves to be paste. The whole was stale as a ballroom when the laughter is fled. The crowded stars were empty sockets; the flaming palaces, scaffolding.

Homesickness? Yes, even in Picardy, even in the wet weariness of the trenches, in the gray rain that soaked into my soul, I had never felt such utter loneliness as here, in the nausea of the revealing dawn.

I came out of the city and set my face sternly to the task of readjustment. I would not be true to my determination to set down without disguise or sentimentalization the history of my shifting moods, actions and reactions, emotions and resolves, if I didn’t write this down. No sooner had I entered the train, pulled my cap over my eyes and sunk back in my corner, than I fell into a mood of extreme weakness. As the instinct to live is stronger in the body, no matter what the will to die, so I believe that in the thinking man the will to continue as a free agent is an instinct deeper than our perceptions. Everything in me rebelled at the sudden subjection which a blind destiny had forced upon me. Something in me cried out imperiously:

“Forget! You must forget!”

And this is the hideous thing: the words of the other woman, the words of Letty, were the ones that sounded in my ears:

“Life is a succession of doors to be closed and never reopened.”

To close the door and never to return! If it were possible!

* * * * *

I said to myself, incredulously, that it was not possible that in ten days I had come to a final and irrevocable love; that the romance and the glamor were for much, that the dramatic quality of the lone woman venturing into the wilderness of men, the mystery which enveloped her, had caught my sympathy. I did not attempt, it is true, to deceive myself into the belief that I did not love her, but I tried to convince myself that I could and must forget her.

Yet, even as rebelling against the cruelty of such destiny, I argued thus, I found myself comparing the women about me, the women there in the car, the women in the crowds of New York, the women of the past I had known, to the Bernoline I loved,--and wondering where again in the empty world I would meet with another such. Suddenly, ahead of me in the far end of the car, a silhouette, the turn of the neck, a carriage of the head, reminded me so vividly of her that I sat bolt upright, staring, and so acute was the sense of her presence that though I knew it to be the wildest trick of fancy, I could not rest until I had risen and reassured myself. I returned and sank back heavily in my corner, no longer with strength or will to struggle against my fate.

The visible things receded, the unreal present dissolved. I abandoned myself to the unforgettable past. I lived again the hours since our meeting. I saw her, I heard her, I talked with her. I was back on the high forward deck, with the cliffs of New York growing into the night. I argued against her decision; I pleaded for us both. I said the things I should have said, as I reconstructed the inexorable past, until, struck by my own absurdity, I regained some measure of self-control.

After all, what remains? What can remain of this, the purest and deepest seeking of my life? I have dreamed a beautiful dream! The rest is a waking to the pain of reality.

Yet is it possible, I wonder, that for this ten days’ dreaming the years of my life must pay the reckoning?

II

At South Norwalk I descended and took the train for Littledale. Hardly had I turned up the platform before I was among friends, welcomed with incredulous shouts: Burke, the conductor, and Lannigan, of the express, smothering me with rapturous greetings. I rode back in the baggage car, the center of an admiring group. The old oil lamps still flickered overhead, undisturbed in their appointed task of gathering in the cobwebs, and for a while I forgot my loneliness in the warm pleasure of being back among my own kind. Heaven be thanked, nothing had changed! The baggage car still dates from 1870, wheezing and bumping over the narrow-gauge road as the old familiar figures gather about the stove in the solemnity of country-store conclave.

I had not thought to have such a thrill, yet a lump was in my throat when at the station old man Carpenter came hobbling up and a group of youngsters set up a cheer. It was no longer New York: it was my America, and I belonged to it.

I refused a trap and set out on foot, after cautioning them against telephoning my arrival. Hardly five years were gone, yet every detail of the green and white village was so definite in my memory that I noted with an intolerant resentment the new porch at Hamill’s and the glass front which had arrived at Sherwood’s corner grocery. All my boyhood was about me as I hurried on under the vaulted elms: Parson Miller’s home, where Ben and I had strung a tick-tack; the green picket fence where the fox terrier came fearfully out when we rattled our sticks; the side street where I had fought M’Ginnis; the hideous soldiers’ monument, where the snowball fights raged; the stone bridge to which I used to steal after supper to meet Jenny. The past lay at my side,--tranquil, unchanging, and undisturbed by the currents that whirled and struggled three thousand miles away, and in that moment I, too, felt a leaping joy in my heart to be in this America which had stood still in the breathless rush of things.

The lights were in the windows of the great hall as I turned the postern and came up the deep well of the evergreens, towards the low, rambling, red house that sat at the feet of the three drooping elms. I came slowly across the white hoar frost which coated the lawn, and the stiff gravel crackled as I stood under the _porte-cochère_, undecided, fearful of what I should find, steeling myself against the shock of disillusionment, and in my heart the cold repugnance of that one dreaded confrontation,--Letty, at the side of Ben. Yet, despite doubt and shrinking, I think that in my heart the deepest sentiment was a weak gladness to leave all the world behind and come back, as a tired boy comes back, into that sheltered warmth which is called home.

As I debated, with a sudden scurry and barking defiance, the dogs came tumbling over each other,--and the next moment old Dan was in my arms, while the two younger dogs, accepting me on faith, set up a furious chatter. Then, a rush of feet across the hall, the door flung open, and something soft and fluttering leaped to my neck;--home was a reality and Molly was crying my name! It was no longer the laughing tomboy of the bobbed hair and short skirts, but a woman whose eyes were on a level with mine. I took her by the shoulders and held her from me fiercely, and then caught her to me once more with a great thankfulness, for the eyes were straight and clear and the heart was the heart of my little sister.

My mother ran out, and it gave me a great thrill to see her face, for we had always stood in awe of her,--of her austerity, her brilliance and her measured mentality. To us she had always been one on whose public services we children should never intrude. I think she must have pictured me as stricken or mutilated, for I shall never forget the first incredulous look on her face as she saw me, and then--the burst of tears. In all my life, in stress and disaster, I never remember to have seen her show such emotion.

“Be careful, with the Governor,” Molly whispered. “Don’t seem surprised. He’s in there.”

He was in the dusky library, sunk in a great leather chair, a drop-light at his side, and I noticed at once how thin and loose was the hand that lay on the magazine.

“Hello, Governor,” I said. “Dropped in to see you.”

He put out his hand and felt of me. He was gray, and the red blood had run from his face and left feeble veins under the drawn skin. The watery eyes came unsteadily up to mine and passed on to the faces of my mother and Molly, in a silent, terrifying interrogation. I guessed what was in his mind, even before he said,--

“Then, it’s closer than I thought.”

The mater stood it without flinching, but Molly swayed and went suddenly out of the room.

“Not much, Governor,” I said, in bluff cheerfulness. “We’re a tough lot. They tried hard to get me, but they couldn’t. Don’t get any such nonsense in your head. I came home because the doctors insisted upon my being fattened up before they’d let me back. Two months’ furlough.”

His fingers had closed over my wrist and, still holding it, he motioned me to be seated.

“Glad you’re here, Davy.”

“And lots to tell you, Governor. I’ve good news for you.”

“Alan?”

Now, the Governor had never been as quick as that, and I ascribe it to the uncanny prescience which comes to the very sick.

“Yes--Alan.” I drew out the cross from my pocket and laid it before him.

“Governor, you don’t need to be ashamed of Alan. He sent that to you, and told me to tell you how he’d won it.”

He looked up quickly at the mater, and his lip trembled so that we hurriedly changed the subject. I left him presently, with a promise to return, and went out into the hall, where Molly’s hand slid into mine.

“Aunt Janie?”

“Upstairs.”

“You expected me?”

“Mr. Brinsmade telephoned.”

“Who’s here?” I said suddenly. “Ben?”

“No. They’re coming at the end of the week.”

This news took a sudden dread from my heart. For that night, the night of my home-coming, I would not have to face that!

* * * * *

The very old change little. Aunt Janie was the same fairy godmother that I remember as a mischievous youngster: tall, thin, a little stooped, soft-voiced, gentle, living in a more measured age, aloof from the momentum of the present. Strange, silent, devoted soul: she had come into the home, asking of life only the opportunity of serving others! She had brought us up, run the house, planted the trees which had grown to stature and let the rest of the world pass her by, faithful to the one and only love of her life, the memory of the Captain of the --th Massachusetts who had died at Antietam. His sword hangs above the fireplace and his portrait is in the locket at her throat. Each night, after the rest of the house has retired, she descends and closes the doors, examines the windows, ushers the dogs into the back hall, and extinguishes the lights. Nothing has ever been able to dissuade her from this last responsibility. We argued with her, we implored her, and, finally, we came to accept with a feeling of restful gratitude the sound of her slippered step up the stairs, ushering in the night.

I am always to her about twelve years old and, I think, her favorite.

“I have prayed for you every night, Davy,” she said, when I put my arm around her. “_You’ve_ come back.”

Possibly she had been dreaming by the fire of the other, who had not returned. I sat there, trying to answer her questions and finding it difficult. It is not easy to talk about the war. The point of view is so different. All that I have lived has been so inevitable, so part of the instincts of the man who fights, that I find it hard to comprehend the curiosity of those who look on it from the outside. To me still it is this other life that is incomprehensible and chaotic, and profoundly disturbing. When men must fight, it is better to forget.--With all the home memories thronging about me, sitting there with Aunt Janie’s hand in mine, I was thinking but one thing.

“In two months I shall return to it--the grim gamble--where those who stake their lives must lose in the end inevitably,--as all gamblers do.”

III

The next night Molly and I drove over to the Brinsmades’. Anne had been insistently in my thoughts all day. All my revolt from the dead weight of emptiness in life was instinctively towards her. Yet I can hardly explain to myself now the strangeness of my conduct, once in her presence, nor the motive that prompted me deliberately to wound her, as though I were seeking once for all to reject her from my life. Was it some savage instinct of honesty towards her, or a strange unhuman bitterness that entered my soul,--a resentment for the thing offered against the thing denied? I do not know. I cannot yet see clearly.

Yet I do know that I came there eagerly, with a great need of the affection of my old playmate. For what Bernoline had waked in me, the discovery of the harmonious companionship of a true woman, had left me with a new feeling of dependence. Perhaps, also, in the years of absence, I had idealized my very human little friend.

* * * * *

I do not know if such contradictory impulses are true to others or only to me. I imagine that few persons would understand me. Yet it is true that in the desolate loneliness against which I was struggling, I longed to find in some one, some one known and kind, some measure of that deep womanhood of the Bernoline who had gone.

* * * * *

When we arrived the dance was in full swing. I stood staring, unable to adjust myself to the carnival note. For months I had not looked on such a scene. For months I had forgotten the existence of this world, where color fired the imagination and music awoke disturbing needs of pleasure. Anne hurried forward, we shook hands, and--a sudden shyness came between us. Others crowded up, an old friend or two, chance acquaintances; an indiscriminate, curious crowd that, to my annoyance, insisted on treating me as a hero. I resented it all. The men offended me. I forgot I had once been like them. How unrelated to actualities they were, these men, mostly of my generation, of the generation of wasted opportunities, well-set-up, pleasing, clean-cut, but so untested, so devoid of the stamp of leadership. What could they know of the realities that were gathering on the horizon? The sobered France of Bernoline lay outside. Light and shadow, I thought. Half the world dancing, while the other half staggers through the night!

Then I thought of the leaping call to duty which, in the coming day, would startle them in the midst of their playtime. And, knowing what I know, the irony of it all stood out. How little they could divine the future or what the immutable, slow-moving course of little things could mean to each.

“My generation is the tragic generation,” De Saint Omer had often said to me. Would this, too, be our tragic generation,--a generation brought up only to play, to enjoy life gluttonously, to pursue pleasure riotously--abruptly halted in the full of the revelry and summoned to face the recurring test of the ages?

* * * * *

I dare say the mood was morbid and my own mental condition was accountable for much in it. Yet there was cause for irritation. My ears were filled with the chatter of silliness. I was paraded for the curiosity of empty-headed girls, outrageously décolleté and bejeweled. Had I been afraid? Wouldn’t I please tell them about the atrocities? Had I really killed a man? What did it feel like? What sort of uniform did I wear? Was it attractive?

One disappointed young lady exclaimed:

“Oh, dear! Then you’re not an aviator. I’m just crazy to have one of those dinky little caps!”

* * * * *

Molly, who divined my irritation, saved the situation by drawing me away into the library, where I shook hands with Mr. Brinsmade, and presently, ashamed of my too evident ill-humor, I returned to the ballroom.

I was a little hurt, too, that Anne had not made more of my coming. I remembered her diffidence, her quick yielding to others who pressed around her, and I asked myself moodily the reason for this attitude. Was it the memory of old days, of certain things half expressed in her letters? Had her father spoken to her as he had to me? Did she expect that I would assume any rights over her? This last thought increased my irritation. I stood at the door of the conservatory, watching her as she danced.

It was not the Anne that I remembered. There was a finished charm about all she did, a grace of conscious assurance, a sure sense of her own value, that for some reason offended me. She was no longer an impulsive girl, but a brilliant and confident woman. From the tumult of her golden hair to the decolleté of her black jet gown, that revealed too boldly the lithe and graceful lines of her body; in the ready smile of attention, to the eyes which had the fevered sense of pleasure, she was one of them,--of a vapid, inconsequential society which, that night, offended every instinct in me.

“And the worst is, she feeds upon it,” I said to myself gloomily.

* * * * *

When the dance ended, she came directly to me, smiling and confident. I was quite at a loss to account for the sudden antagonism which came over me.

“I’ve saved this dance: it’s yours, Davy. If you’ll ask me?”

“I’ve forgotten how,” I said shortly, and with very bad grace. “Besides, after all this while, we might have something to say to each other.”

Now, this was not only ill-humored, but unjustified. She looked at me quickly and then, with a glance down the conservatory: “There’s a corner. Let’s sit it out, then?”

A little remorseful, I gave her my arm, saying:

“First I want to thank you for your letters. They meant a lot.”

She did not answer, suddenly serious, wondering, perhaps, at my mood. When we had come to our corner she turned and faced me.

“You have changed, Davy.”

“And I don’t think I should have known you.” She looked at me so quickly that I added, “You see--I am dazzled.”

“You do not approve?”

The truth is that I did not quite approve, and her question threw me off my guard. She must have read in my eyes, for such a hurt look came to the corners of her lips that I repeated hastily:

“My dear Anne, I am dazzled. Just think; I have come out of a gray world, and I am still blinking with astonishment. I can’t quite get used to it. You women are different from the women over there--more feminine, perhaps--but you represent something I had forgotten. Don’t pay any attention to me. I’m an old bear who comes to you, grumbling, out of the wet and the mud.”

“I see,” she said, and then, “but I do pay attention to what you say, so please be frank, as you always were, Davy.”

“I don’t think you would understand,” I began and then, struck by the absurdity of it, I broke into a laugh. “After all, it isn’t the slightest business of mine.”

“Am I any different from the rest?”

I looked into the dancing crowd.

“No, of course not.”

“Well--then?”

“Anne, you will not understand in the least; you probably will be offended, but, since you ask, I will tell you.”

But there I stopped.

“So, you’re not going to tell me?”

“No. Besides, it is a question of a point of view.”

“I wonder what you really think of me, Davy?” she said, puzzled. “Is it such a very bad opinion?”

“It is not your fault. It is the whole system,” I blurted out, led on by my growing irritation; the feeling, perhaps, of the quality of girlhood that should be there and was now gone; the eyes that had seen too much, the ears that had heard too much, the woman who knew too well her worth in the eyes of men. Perhaps it was because I needed to see her differently that I felt so strongly. “It’s you who are defrauded. There are bigger things in our women than just the pursuit of pleasure. However,” I broke off, with a sudden laugh, “I am just as absurd to be talking to you like this!”

“I wanted to go over there and nurse,” she said, looking down. “Heavens, don’t you think I’m tired of this sort of life!”

“I wonder just how sincere that is,” I said, watching her with amusement. “Service, or--adventure?”

She sat up, suddenly frowning.

“You will go back?”

“Of course.”

Suddenly a recollection smote me.

“My dear Anne, don’t mind me to-night. I dare say I’m unjust, but I’m living in another world, and this shocks me--the incomprehension of it all! Are these really men and women, and do they think war is a vaudeville show? Yes, I am out of temper; but if you’d heard the questions I’ve been asked! I beg your pardon. You were very good to write me all the time: it meant a lot, too.”

She looked up, so happily, that I began to reproach myself for my boorishness.

“What is it you don’t like in me?”

“I should like to see you--you and Molly--in the blue and white of the Red Cross, with big square hob-nailed boots, splashing around in the mud and rain, with smirches on your dainty noses!”

I had hurt her, despite my assumed levity, and I knew it. Some one came up to claim a dance, and she rose quickly, both of us glad of the interruption. The rest of the evening I spent with Mr. Brinsmade, discussing politics. Now that I write it, I am sorry that I acted as I did. Yet I am at a loss to know why.

IV

I have seen Letty. I had steeled myself against the meeting, with a cold, panicky dread. Yet, when the actual test came, I was amazed at my self-possession. The inevitable thing is, after all, the easiest thing to do. It was so, I remember, with my first test in battle, the question of courage, which had so tortured my imagination, clarified itself with the first command. I answered it, as others did, because, I think, there was no choice.

So, the moment that the crisis arose, I knew it would have to be gone through,--that I would have to meet her eyes and his without a false movement. It had to be done, and I did it, as calmly and as naturally as though I had lied all my life. And yet, there was one awful moment for me,--and for her, too.

They had motored over for luncheon and I knew that they would arrive about one o’clock. I debated and made a dozen decisions, changing them immediately. I would wait until all the company was assembled and meet them in the confusion of the crowd. I even contemplated a morning canter, timing my ride so as to meet them on my return, and obtain some clue of the exact situation in the advantage of the hasty informality. For I felt a cold dread of the test. What had she told him? Was I to act as a chance acquaintance, or as an old friend? If I pretended ignorance, my attitude might rouse his suspicions immediately. Yet if I called her by her first name and showed the knowledge of an intimate, I might precipitate a dangerous situation. I must take my cue from her, holding myself alertly on my guard.

At the last moment, at the sound of their entering the driveway, I did the thing I had not even considered. I went out on the porch and stood forth openly to greet them, curiously calm and ready for any turn, now that it was a question of danger. Yet I loathed the dissimulation I could not escape. The next instants seemed leaden. The car drove up. I looked at Ben, steadily, controlling my glance. Fortunately, he was nearest to me.

“Hello, there, old fellow!”

“Hello, Ben,” I said, in my heart a great thankfulness.

“_Bon jour, Monsieur_, my brother-in-law; you have not forgotten me?”

I looked. I had to look. Letty’s shadowy eyes--calm, even a trifle amused--were on me, and no more trace of emotion than was in her voice.

“The idea! But I did not expect to meet you again like this,” I heard myself saying, with all the banality of an accomplished society fop. Had there been a look of fear or distress in her eyes I might have faltered, but the self-possession roused my anger and that carried me through. I took the gloved hand (thank heaven it was gloved) and forced some sort of a smile to my face. Fortunately the others ran out, and the first test was over.

Luncheon ended, after coffee in the conservatory, Ben said:

“Davy, let’s take a tramp around the duck pond. There are some things I want to talk over with you.”

I rose and I know that my heart leaped. I saw Letty’s little fingers work slowly up the arms of her chair and her shoulders stiffen. That was all; but I, who knew Letty, knew what terror was beneath.

We bundled up and went out over the hard ground, and, as we turned the conservatory, I saw that Letty had taken up a position by the window. I did not dare look at her, for my own heart within me stood still, while I waited his first words. Everything required me to make some reference to his wife, and yet I could not do it. My tongue refused to move.

“The mater does not like my marriage, Davy,” he said finally, after he had waited for me to begin the conversation. “Oh, it’s nothing open; she’s too loyal for that, you know; but of course, their worlds are absolutely different. Still, I feel it, and I know that Letty feels it.”

“Yes, I suppose that would be so,” I said, forced to answer.

Again, he seemed to wait for something I should say and when I remained silent, he dropped into a silence, too. Presently, he began to whistle to himself, and so we came to the duck pond. The cabin we had built as children still stood, sagging and covered with moss.

“I can’t get Rossie out of my mind,” I said suddenly. “Remember the day he stepped into the hornet’s nest and had to dive into the pond?”

We stood on the rustic bridge, leaning over the rail, the white, solemn ducks waddling below us.

“Davy, will you answer me a direct question?”

I felt the moment approaching.

“Fire away.”

“Did you ever write back anything against Letty to the family?”

“What!”

He repeated the question, while for me the tension relaxed. Still, this might be only a preliminary.

“Ben, I have never written a word home mentioning your wife one way or the other.”

“You knew her well in Paris, didn’t you?”

“We were in the same crowd, yes.”

“Weren’t you a little bit in love with her at one time?”

“Frankly, yes; we all were.”

I had given my answers readily, for each question I had foreseen.

“Do you know, Davy,” he said, looking me in the face, “that I am beginning to think that you, too, do not approve.”

“That’s a hard question to answer, but since you’ve put it,--here goes. There’s been something closer between us, Ben, than other brothers. I think I would make any sacrifice for you and your happiness. I’m not thinking of Letty; I’m thinking of you. I know her world and I know yours. Her world is a world that takes everything lightly and is not bruised by disillusionments. You are different. If you should be unhappy, it would break you.”

“You don’t know her as I know her,” he broke in.

“No--of course not.” For a moment the hideous irony of it escaped me. Had it been any other man, I would have been willing to convince myself that Letty, like a thousand other women of her class, was capable, once her love awakened, of absolute loyalty and devotion. But did she really love him, beyond a caprice of the emotions? That was what I did not know.

“Ben, you know that I am always loyal, no matter what happens. If it were a question of your good, old fellow, I would give my right arm.”

I held out my hand, and waited. If he could not bring himself to take it--but he did--though after some hesitation! The first test, thank God, was over. He could not have suspected and done that!

* * * * *

What had we said to each other? What could I have said differently? I was caught in the iron grip of circumstance, and every word was dictated to me. I knew my brother, and I was afraid,--coldly, mortally afraid. Such men are capable of murder.

Then I told him of Bernoline. Some instinct warned me to do so, and the way his face cleared and the old affection returned confirmed my suspicions. Beneath all he had said (or not said) was something brooding. Only, in that case, the situation was more than ever fraught with danger.

We went back over the old days, when we four were the Littledale boys,--Big Dale, Little Dale, Tiny Dale, and Rossie, who was no Dale at all. With the clearing vista of years, I saw my brother as he was, and I was astonished to find in my new estimate a sense of personal superiority. He felt it, too, for once or twice he said something which showed me that he had a feeling of having stood still.

I told him of having seen Alan.

“I never liked him,” he said, without compromise, “and there’s no use pretending; but I’m glad he made good.” He turned to me, laying his hand on my arm for the first time. “Davy, there’s not been much luck in the family, has there? We’re out of existence--shot to pieces. And the other time doesn’t seem so very far ago,--the time when we romped and played like good, wholesome puppies. Rossie gone--Alan drifting about the world--you crawling back by the skin of your teeth--I suppose there’s no use arguing with you about your going back?”

“None.”

“Well, if we don’t wake up and get into it, I’m going, myself,” he blurted out. “The mater, of course, is all for pacifism, but as for the Governor, I believe he’s just hanging on until we declare war.”

“I believe so, too.”

“Must seem strange to you, here.”

“Yes--strange.”

We each wished the interview over, I felt. With all our attempts at restoring the old intimacy, there was a constraint on us we couldn’t shake off.

* * * * *

The first thing I saw, as we went back, was Letty’s face at the window of the conservatory. It was only a look, for she rose immediately and shifted her seat, but that look I shall never efface from my memory. She was no coward. Indeed, I have never known any woman with more of the reckless, devil-may-care attitude towards danger, but that vital hour, when she sat there and wondered, must have tried her soul.

When we entered she was consummately at ease. She did not appear to notice our coming, but once I caught her glancing furtively in the mirror, watching Ben.

I went on upstairs and there, in the old playroom, the tension I had been under snapped and my nerves went bad and, as I was doubled up, shivering and shaking, Molly found me. It must have frightened her out of her wits, to come upon me without warning, for by the time the spell was over, she was in my arms, weeping her heart out.

“Oh, Davy, you aren’t going back, like that!”

“Nonsense! It’s almost over--only, once in a while--when something excites me.”

“You’ve been talking to Ben,” she said, straightening up. “Davy, I don’t _like_ her! And, what’s more, Ben isn’t happy!”

What could I say? I couldn’t look into my dear little sister’s clean eyes and counsel her to accept Letty with an open heart.

* * * * *

I went back presently and joined the company. I knew that in public I must pay my brother’s wife some attention. To avoid her would be confession. She had quite recovered by this time and was her own malicious self again.

“Do you know, David, that you have neglected me shamefully?” she said aloud. “You were more gallant in Paris.”

I made some lame excuse. I do not remember what I muttered and, avoiding any intimacy, turned the conversation to common acquaintances. I cannot remember a more hideously disagreeable hour in all my life. Not that there was left any flicker of the old infatuation. The image of Bernoline had cleansed the old fever. I looked at Letty and, looking at her, wondered that I could meet her eyes without a tremor. She felt this, I know, and did not like the sensation for, despite the danger of the situation, her voice at times took on the old caressing tone and her eyes sparkled with the desire to entice. Our conversation was necessarily banal in the presence of others. It was not until they started to go that I found myself alone with her on the porch.

“I hope to God you did it because you love him,” I said, without premeditation.

“And if there was any other reason, Davy?” she said softly.

“He is quite capable of killing you. I give you a solemn warning.”

Her fur slipped to the ground and, as I recovered it, she said aloud:

“Thank you, my brother-in-law--and you will be sociable, and run over?”

Ben had come up as we were speaking, but her quick ear had detected his approach.

* * * * *

The interview has left me quite in the dark. Why had she done it? Is she in love with Ben? Is there any change in the inner woman? Can she be held wholly and loyally by a man with whom she cannot trifle, before whom she is genuinely afraid? Was it the dramatic revenge that tempted her? Or was it just the instinct of social self-preservation, the fetich of that great god, Respectability, which dominates all such women? For, protest as they may, no matter how they rage against conventionalities, flout them openly or secretly, in the heart of each lawless woman, whether her situation be sheltered or ruthlessly exposed, is the slumbering veneration of the thing called respectability. Once passed the thirties, it becomes an obsession. Perhaps, after all, it was the safe haven of respectability that Letty sought, at the end of a few adventurous years. Perhaps, it was a combination of all these motives. But, of one thing I am certain,--Letty is afraid of her husband.

V

_December_

My first Sunday has come and gone. All day I have been looking at myself and at my home with a new revelation of values. Strangely enough, I never before perceived its significance. France and another civilization have suddenly thrown it into a clearer relief, and all the while the words of Bernoline return to my memory. What a contrast!

At eleven o’clock we departed to Sunday worship: Ben and my mother to the Unitarian Church; Aunt Janie to the Congregational, with father; and Molly and myself to a Presbyterian service, accompanied by the servants. No scene is more typical of what we are: a group of individualists bound together by mutual tolerance. Are we a home, I wonder, or simply a shelter over a group of lodgers for this night or for many nights? Of course, it is not fair to take us as typical of America. Yet we are typical of one thing,--a developed type of traditional New England. This morning, as I sat in the old pew, with Molly by my side, I thought with a little tightening of my heart that even in the coming days of suspense when I go back to the front my family will not be even united in its sorrow.

* * * * *

The whole contrast between our two civilizations, French and American, is here,--in the family. Thinking on this to-night, I understand Bernoline better. The sense of duty that dominates her life and makes sacrifice so easily possible is the sense of family solidarity. Love of the mother, respect for the authority of the father, companionship with the children,--it is a France in miniature, and that greater love of country is but a tradition of family pride.

I do not think we have this strongly disciplined sense of duty nor this unquestioning acceptance of sacrifice. How often children are but accidents and sometimes strangers under the same roof. In my own case, what is my father to me? Do I know him as well as I know the boy I roomed with at school, I wonder? There is hardly an opinion we share or an outlook on life which we could understand together. He has never really discussed anything with me, as though instinctively he divined I would take an opposite view.

I don’t say what should be. Yet to-night, perhaps because the sense of loss of a dear and necessary presence accents my own loneliness, I can visualize another type of home--the home of Bernoline--and wonder.... After all, there is something that touches the heart strings in the thought of the generations succeeding each other, standing for the same ideal of conduct, the same loyalty to a conception of state and faith, passing down the same standard from father and son and guarding it in reverence! Governments change as I change my hat; waves of paganism, materialism and doubt come and pass; but so long as the family faith is untouched, France will be found equal to its past. Order, stability, discipline,--the sunken cornerstone of the national consciousness are all in this conception, and I think to understand this is to understand why there was no miracle in France’s answer in the month of August, 1914.

* * * * *

Yet, I have no doubt now of America’s answer when the call is clear: only we will respond from different motives. If the sense of duty is not developed here by old traditions, there is a man’s pride in doing what free men should do. It will be a great voluntary impulse, something that has come down to us from our strong, free, battling ancestors of Jutland, of those who sang of heroic deaths and defied the tempest and the perils of the forest, who never bowed to king or conqueror,--the fierce dissenting strain of Saxon manhood. I am not afraid of this heritage when stirred by the test of war;--but in peace?

What is the basic impulse, then, that moves through our Anglo-Saxon civilization? It is the relation between man and woman, and this conception of love as heroic is of the origins of our race. Christianity did not exalt women with us. In the days of the Berserkers and the sea-rovers, man and woman clove together in single partnership and kept their faith. So, to-day, the children in the house are but waiting the touch of destiny, free agents, held by no family tradition, impatient for life to open to them. Under all the sentimentalism of our literature and art there is this abiding instinct, the need of love that shall come as a directing purpose. Each child, in the imagination of boy or girl, holds it as his right to give his heart where it pleases him, no matter what the wrench or what the sacrifice, as the beginning and the meaning of life. In this instinct to determine our own existence as children in our father’s house, we remain fierce and rebellious, as our Saxon heroes who served, but feared neither their gods nor their masters. We do not inherit our homes: we create them.

* * * * *

My little sister, who hangs on my arm and comes to me with her confidences, knows deep in her heart that this is not her home. To-morrow she will look in the eyes of some stranger and, despite all our entreaties, pleadings, warnings, put her hand in his and follow him into the outer world. No wonder that we have colonized the earth, when each of us has in him the soul of the pioneer! And now that I have written this, I think I understand why I cannot do what would be so easy for a Latin to do. Marriage to us is not a formula, but a need of our hidden spiritual self, the meaning of our existence. No, I can never turn to Anne with a divided memory, not even in the instinct of self-preservation!

Everything separates me from Bernoline. In our basic conceptions of life, she in her clear outlook of faith, and I in my driven questionings; she in her unquestioned acceptance of duty; I in my rebellion against aught which means the immolation of self on the altar of convention. We are as distant as though she stood at the threshold of a hundred years and I at the close. A civilization and an age intervene between us. Yet why, knowing this, despite instinct and will, have we been powerless to turn away? Is it, I wonder, because the thing is so utterly hopeless, forbidden, destructive, that the instinct of Eden draws us irresistibly to our destiny?

* * * * *

Yesterday I read in Maeterlinck’s “Life of The Bee” that strange and terrible chapter of the Nuptial Flight, which in its fearful mystery of love and death reveals to us the mysterious origin in nature’s purpose of our human seeking. How little we foresee in the first quickening ecstasy of our beings the destiny of tragedy towards which we move! How little, in that one clear, untroubled afternoon, when all the beating frenzy in me grew still and peaceful with the knowledge that I was loved, did I divine that the rapture which held me was but the prelude to life denied and the ache of happiness remembered. Mystery of good and evil! How often this thought returns across the vista of my life!

The thing I cannot struggle against is silence,--this blank wall of silence that I cannot seize and yet which fastens about me and shuts out all hope. If I could but see her, talk to her, write to her! But between that and nothingness is my promise. Yesterday, in my loneliness and rebellion, I wrote her,--a wild, incoherent letter, imploring her to release me of a promise beyond my strength to keep. I sealed it and addressed it, refusing to listen to anything but the fever and the revolt that burned through every fiber of my being. I rushed out of the house and down to the village, with only one thought,--to end the suspense, to be done with my conscience by an irrevocable act. And then I came back, slowly, with lagging steps, beaten, the letter destroyed. Why? Because, in all the checkered path of my life, there is one memory inviolate. No matter what I have done, and bitterly regretted; no matter what I may come to in some middle-aged sophistry,--I once have reached an ideal of myself. This ideal that she, Bernoline, created of me can never be lowered. Whatever in its tyranny this memory demands of me, I shall in the end obey.

VI

I remember an incident in my boyhood. A little Airedale called Frazzles had become so wild that a conference of the powers had decided on sending her away to a veterinary. The sentence was duly carried out, and Frazzles was deported in the last days of autumn, while we children howled our grief in the nursery. The next we heard of her, she had escaped and taken to the woods some twenty miles away, where she was living like a wild animal. The winter passed and then the spring, and one day Frazzles came, scratching at the door, weary, savage, and caked with mud. The door opened, she flew to her old post under the blue sofa by the fireplace. Six months had passed,--outcast from home and humanity, yet, at the hour when the tea-cakes were brought in, she crept out of her hiding; place and lay at the feet of Aunt Janie, just as though it were yesterday.

At times I feel strangely akin to that little bedraggled outcast. I have fallen back so easily into the familiar routine that all the other life seems incredible. Have I ever really lived in the wet and slime of the trenches, pillowed on a foul blanket; and is it possible that in a few short weeks the moving finger of fate will return and touch me over again? It is so far off, so obscure, fainter than a dying echo; only the memory of Bernoline is vivid and acute with the power to pain.

Against this memory I struggle day and night. There are times when I combat it fiercely in the instinct of self-preservation, when I try to reach down into my heart and tear out the thing that aches. At others, I yield to a fool’s paradise and delude myself with impossible solutions that deceive me but for an hour.

* * * * *

Yesterday, in my desperation, I went over to the Brinsmades’. I went, deliberately, to see Anne. Why, I do not know. For Anne, I think, loves me, and, despite all my reason, all my will to escape from my destiny, I do not, I cannot love her as she deserves to be loved. Perhaps, if I had not met Bernoline--

I went, hesitating and undecided. I came away convinced. Whatever comes, I care this much for my boy-hood’s companion; I shall never come to her with a memory between us.

* * * * *

It was a morning when Bernoline’s presence had been so acutely near me that there was no escape from the blank impossibility of the future. Did I go to seek some strange, healing comfort in the knowledge of another’s suffering,--even as I suffered without possibility of hope? The instinct of love is, I suppose, so fiercely primitive in us that under its tyranny we are subjected to some moral atavism. All the primitive passions that have swayed us from the dawn of time are suddenly let loose and, with the leaping impulse towards possession, comes the instinct to hate violently or to desire fiercely the joy that comes from the feeling of being able to cause pain, to turn against another all that we suffer from the one we love. Girl or courtesan, I have seen women pour out treasures of sacrifice to one man and at the same time show themselves savagely, incomprehensibly pitiless to an unwelcome lover.

* * * * *

Not that all this was in my thought. Far from it. I went, brooding and restless, without impulse but to escape from myself. I drove over after luncheon, after telephoning my coming.

She came down immediately and at my first look I felt a guilty feeling, yet one of some compensating happiness.

“There’s a house party, but I got rid of them,” she said, giving me both her hands. “Do you know, Davy, you have waited a long, long time to come.”

“I have wanted to, many times.”

“Really, and honestly?” she said, looking me in the eyes.

“Of course.”

My heart smote me as I met her glance. One word from me had brought back the comrade of other days. From her hair to the stout walking boots, all artifice had been so evidently offered up on the altar of my criticism that I could not help saying:

“Now I remember an old friend.”

She laughed at this and her eyes sparkled, but there was a retort on her tongue.

“It’s quite hopeless to try and please you,--and I who fondly believed I was going to make such an impression on you with my grand manner!”

“Now, Miss Flattery, you don’t take me in like that. There were others present, and--you didn’t know I was coming.”

“Father told me,” she said abruptly. “Let’s get out of this hothouse atmosphere. How about a ramble into the glen? There’s not enough snow to bother us. Shall we?”

“Agreed.”

Well bundled up, we struck out over the frozen swamps for the solitudes of the hills, and as we went a curious diffidence fell between us.

“David, it’s you who are the stranger,” she said suddenly. “You are changed, much changed.”

“In what way?”

“Your eyes are terribly critical of things you don’t like. You--you rather intimidate me. Please be a little kind in your judgments.”

“I am not aware--”

“Yes, you have changed. Before, I often wondered how you would turn out--you might have gone so many ways. You have been tested and you have found yourself. Only, Davy, in finding yourself, I think you have forgotten a little the way you have gone and are apt to be without much indulgence towards others.”

Now, the directness of this analysis and its point quite startled me.

“Do you think I am like that?” I said, wondering.

She nodded decisively, twice.

“And dreadfully direct. You can’t conceal what you feel.”

A memory returned, and, also, a possible explanation.

“What I said that first night hurt you?”

“Terribly.”

“You attach too much importance to a chance remark.”

“Don’t.”

I stopped short in my lumbering explanation.

“Don’t talk to me like that,” she said, looking at me with a little frown above her eyes. “Davy, in the old days there was nothing but absolute honesty between us--no nonsense. I have known many men since you went; naturally, some who attracted me,--one or two, very much--”

“Naturally,” I said, but, to my surprise, with a certain instinctive resentment.