Part 18

"A healthy emotion is not excitement," said Mr. Brougham. "But you have been cold, absolutely cold to the horror of the world's bleeding to death, to all this unnatural disaster that has come upon us."

"It doesn't seem exactly unnatural to me," answered the boy slowly. "At least I've got used to it. You see, sir, ever since I knew anything--ever since I was Lawrence's age--war has been about the most natural thing going. I suppose it's very different for all of you. Coming at the end of a perfectly peaceful life, it must seem like a sort of dirty accident; but even so, it's awfully queer to me the way you and mother have to lash yourselves up to doing anything--"

"Lash ourselves up?" exclaimed Mr. Brougham.

"Yes, with the idea of patriotism and self-sacrifice, when it's so perfectly clear what we all have to do. Why, father, I feel just as if I were a policeman, or, no, a fireman--I feel as if I were a fireman and you expected me to get off something about patriotism and self-sacrifice every time I went to put out a fire. A fireman goes, all right--it's his job; but I dare say he often wishes he could stay in bed. No one says his heart is cold, and no more it is, to my mind. It must be fun to go off in a burst of patriotic enthusiasm. I know, for I've often felt like that about football. But this is different. This isn't a sport--it's a long disagreeable job. And I must say, father, it makes me pretty tired to have you think me a slacker because I don't get, and don't want to get, excited about it."

"You misunderstand me," said his father. "I don't think any man a slacker who waits to think it over before he makes the supreme sacrifice and offers"--Mr. Brougham's voice took a deeper note--"his life."

David turned sharply to Granby.

"There," he said, "that's what I hate! I hate that attitude toward death--as if it were something you couldn't speak of in the drawing-room. Death isn't so bad," he added, as if saying what he could for an absent friend.

With this Mr. Brougham couldn't even pretend to agree; death seemed to him very bad indeed--about the worst possible, though not to be evaded by brave men on that account.

"Ah," he said to Granby, "that's the beauty of youth--it doesn't think about death at all."

"Nonsense," said David. "I beg your pardon, sir, but isn't it nonsense? Of course, we think of it--a lot more than you do. The chances are about one in twenty that I'll be killed. When you were my age you were planning your career, and college, and you thought you'd be married sometime, and you were getting your name put up at clubs you couldn't get into for years. But fellows of my age aren't making any plans--it would be pretty foolish if we did. We haven't got any future, as you had it. I don't know if you call that thinking about death. I do--thinking about it as a fact, not a horror. We've been up against it for the last four years, and we've got used to it. That's what none of you older people seem to be able to get into your heads. We don't particularly mind the idea of dying. And now I think I'll run home and tell my mother."

Neither of the men spoke for a few minutes after he had gone. Mr. Brougham was shocked. He had just caught himself back from telling David that he ought to be afraid of dying--which of course was not at all what he meant. He himself had always feared death--most of the men he knew feared it--only hadn't allowed that fear to influence their actions. He had always regarded this fear as a great universal limitation. He felt as if a great gulf had suddenly opened between him and his son. More than that, he felt that to live free from the terror was too great an emancipation for one so young.

"If they're not afraid of death, what are they afraid of?" he found himself thinking.

He himself in his youth had never thought about dying--except sometimes in church in connection with music and crowns and glassy seas. Then once, when he was only a little younger than David, he had been very ill in the school infirmary; another boy had died, and then, he remembered, he did for the first time consider the possibility of his, Walter Brougham's, coming to an end, stopping, going out perhaps like a candle. It had been an uncomfortable experience, and when his mother had come to take care of him he had distinctly clung to her--as if she could have done any good. Had these boys gone through that and come out on the other side? He found it alarmed him to think that David wasn't afraid.

Good heavens, what would they do--this new generation, young and healthy and unafraid of death, not because they had never thought about it but because they had been familiar with it since they went into long trousers?

Mr. Granby broke the silence. He said: "To order ourselves lowly and reverently to all our betters?"

Brougham was puzzled by these words, and he felt that it was no time for puzzling him.

"Did you think David was impertinent to me, Mr. Granby?" he asked. "Is that what you meant?"

"No, that isn't what I meant, Mr. Brougham."

Brougham didn't inquire any further. He shook his head and went home. He found his wife and David sitting hand in hand on the piazza looking out to sea, with the same blank grave look on both their faces. Yet they were thinking very different thoughts.

Mrs. Brougham was thinking that she had been strangely stupid not to know that this was just exactly the way David would do it; but she added to herself she had allowed her vision to be clouded by her husband.

David was carefully reviewing the small stock of his technical knowledge of aëroplanes.

WORSE THAN MARRIED

Miss Wilbur sat up and wrung the water out of her hair. Most of us have looked about a dinner-table and wondered which of the party would make the pleasantest companion on a desert island; Juliana had done it often enough, but now the comic touch was lacking. Far out, hung on some unknown reef, the prow of the vessel stuck up black and tall, almost as if she were still pursuing a triumphant course landward, though a list to starboard betrayed her desperate condition, and a second glance showed that the waves were breaking over her stern. The heavy swell was all that was left of the storm. The sun had just risen in a cloudless sky, above a dark-blue sea. It was perhaps that bright horizontal ray which had waked Miss Wilbur. It had not disturbed her rescuer, who, more provident, had hidden his face in his arm.

It seems hardly possible for a young lady to be dragged from her berth in the dead of night, hauled to the deck, and literally dumped into a small boat, to be tossed out of the boat and dragged to shore--all by a man whose face and name were equally unknown. But the more she looked at the back of that damp head, and the line of those shoulders, the less familiar did they appear. This was hardly surprising, for since she and her maid had taken the steamer at Trinidad, she had made so little effort at _rapprochement_ with her fellow passengers that she could hardly call any of them to mind--a great German from a banking house in Caracas; a sunburnt native botanist bound for the Smithsonian; a little Englishman from the Argentine; these were the only three figures she could remember. Who was this man? A sailor? A commercial traveler? Of what standing and what nationality?

She coughed presently: "I wish you'd wake up," she said, "and let me thank you for saving my life."

The first result of this remark was that the man grunted and buried his nose deeper in the sand. Then he rolled over, stood up, and comprehensively hitching up what remained of his trousers, he looked carefully round the horizon, then at the wall of palm-trees behind them, and last of all at Miss Wilbur, without the smallest change of expression.

"Did I save you?" he asked.

"Yes, don't you remember? You caught me up in the dark--"

"I had a notion it was Mrs. Morale's son." Again his eyes sought the horizon, and he turned to move away, but she arrested him with a question.

"Do you think we shall be rescued?" she said.

He stopped, eyed her, and again turned away. His silence annoyed her. "Why don't you answer my question?"

"Because I thought it just about worthy of someone who wakes up a tired man to thank him for saving her life. Do I think we'll be rescued? That depends on whether we are in the track of vessels; and I know neither the track of vessels nor where we are. It depends on whether any of the other boats lived through the night. But I'll tell you one thing. It looks to me as if they needn't trouble to come at all, if they don't come soon. I'm going to hunt up breakfast."

He disappeared into the forest of palms, leaving her alone. She would have liked to call him back and ask him what he thought of the probabilities of snakes on the island. Tact, however, that civilized substitute for terror, restrained her. She thought him very peculiar. "I wonder if he's a little crazy," she thought. "I wonder if something hit him on the head."

He was gone a long time, and when he returned carried a bunch of bananas and three cocoanuts. He stopped short on seeing her. "Do you mean to say," he cried, "that you haven't been drying your clothes? What do you suppose I stayed away so long for? But no matter. Have your breakfast first."

She refrained from expressing, at once, a profound distaste for cocoanuts, but when he cut one and handed it to her, the smell overcame her resolutions. "Oh!" she said, drawing back, "I can't bear them."

"You will order something else on the menu?"

The tone was not agreeable, and Miss Wilbur eyed the speaker. No wonder she was at a loss, for hitherto her measure of men had been the people they knew, the clothes they wore, and, more especially, their friendliness to herself. In the present case, none of these were much help, and she decided to resort to the simpler means of the direct question. Besides, it had always been Juliana's custom to converse during her meals and, peculiar though this one appeared, she saw no reason for making it an exception.

"Doesn't it seem strange," she began, "that I don't even know your name?"

"Nathaniel or Spens?"

"Oh! Spens, of course," she answered, quite as if they had met in a ballroom. "And don't you think," she went on, "that it would be nice if we knew a little more about each other than just our names?"

"A little more?" he exclaimed. "My idea was we were getting near the too much point."

"But I meant our past selves, our everyday selves--our _real_ selves."

"So did I. I hope we sha'n't get any realler. This is real enough to suit me." He continued under his breath to ring the changes on this idea to his own intense satisfaction.

Miss Wilbur gave up and began again. "I think it would be interesting to tell each other a little of our lives--who we are, and where we came from. For instance I'm willing to begin--I'm a New Yorker. My mother died when I was sixteen, and I have been at the head of my father's house ever since--he has retired from business. We are quite free, and we travel a great deal. I came down here on a yacht. You may ask why I left it--well, a little difficulty arose--a situation. The owner, one of my best and oldest friends--" She paused. As she talked, questions had floated through her mind. Does he take in the sort of person I am at home? Does he realize how his toil is lightened by the contrast of my presence in the benighted spot? Does he know what a privilege it is to be cast away with me? He was saying to himself: "If only I can get home before the first, I'll increase that quarterly dividend."

She took up her narrative. "The owner, as I say, was one of my best and oldest friends; and yet, you know--"

"And yet you quarreled like one o'clock."

"Oh, no," said Miss Wilbur. "We did not quarrel. It would have been better if we had."

"Just sulked, you mean?"

This was more than she could bear. "He wanted to marry me," she said firmly.

"Not really!" he exclaimed, and then, studying her more carefully, he added: "But of course--very naturally. I am sure to some types of men you would be excessively desirable."

This was the nearest approach to a compliment that she had had since the ship struck, and she gulped at it eagerly.

"Desirable is not quite the word," she answered. "But perhaps I should rather have you think of me as desirable than not at all," and she smiled fascinatingly.

"Great Cæsar's ghost!" he exclaimed. "Did I say I was thinking of you? But there, I mean--I mean--" But it was unnecessary to complete the sentence, for Miss Wilbur rose, with what dignity a tattered dressing gown allowed, and moved away. He followed her and explained with the utmost civility where there was another beach, how she should spread out her clothes to the sun, and added gravely, holding up one finger: "And remember to keep in the shade yourself."

"Oh, the sun never affects me," said Juliana.

This answer plainly tried him, but with some self-control he merely repeated his injunction in exactly the same words.

Miss Wilbur's costume was not elaborate. It comprised, all told, a night-gown, a pink quilted dressing-gown, a pair of men's sneakers, and a bit of Cartier jewelry about her throat. She wished that dressing-gown had been more becoming. Just before she sailed she had sent her maid out to buy something warm, and the pink atrocity had been the result. She had thought it did not matter then, but, now that she might have to spend the rest of her life in it, she wished she had taken the trouble to choose it herself.

Even if she had been completely alone on this Caribbean island, she was too much a child of civilization to remove all her clothes at once. The process took time. As she sat under the trees and waited, she considered her position.

Feelings of dislike for, and dependence upon, her rescuer grew together in her mind. She did not say, even to herself, that she was afraid of him, very much in the same way in which she had once been afraid of her schoolmistress--afraid of his criticism and his contempt, but she expressed the same idea by saying "he was not very nice to her." That he "was rather rude"! She thought how differently any of the men she had left on the yacht at Trinidad would have behaved. Alfred, for instance. It would have been rather fun to have been cast away with Alfred. He would have been tender and solicitous. Poor Alfred! She began to think it had been an absurd scruple that had made her leave the party. It had seemed as if she could not cruise another day on the yacht of a man she had refused so decidedly to marry. After such a scene, too! Miss Wilbur frowned and shook her head at the recollection. As a matter of fact, she liked scenes.

She had so far used the freedom of her life in eliminating from her consciousness those who did not contribute to her self-esteem. Sometimes she created admiration where it had not existed. Sometimes, when this seemed impossible, she simply withdrew. The latter method was obviously out of the question on this little dot of an island.

But the other? One of the unquestioned facts in Miss Wilbur's life was her own extreme charm; and this thought brought another to her mind. The picture of the traditional male--the beast of prey! In spite of the American girl's strange mixture of inexperience and sophistication, she is not entirely without the instinct of self-preservation. She remembered his long Yankee jaw with relief.

When she returned she found he had erected four poles with cross beams and was attempting to thatch it with banana-leaves, to the accompaniment of a low sibilant whistle.

"What's that?" she asked. He completed the phrase diminuendo before answering.

"This," he said, "is where you are going to sleep, and, if it doesn't fall in on you in the night, I'll build another for myself to-morrow. Look out where you step. I'm drying two vestas on that rock. If they light, we'll have a fire, and perhaps some day something to eat. Suppose you go and find some wood?"

She hesitated. "Do you think there are snakes on this island?" she hazarded; and oh, with what enthusiasm such a suggestion of femininity would have been received on the yacht!

"Think not," said her companion; "but I'd look out for scorpions and centipedes and things like that, you know."

The suggestion did not increase her enthusiasm for her task. She hung about a few minutes longer and then collected a few twigs along the beach, raising them carefully between her thumb and forefinger. They did not make an imposing pile, as she felt when her rescuer came to inspect it, looking first at it and then at her, with his hands in his pockets.

"I hope you won't overdo?" he said.

Juliana colored. "Did you expect me to carry great logs?" she asked. "Women can't do that sort of thing."

He moved away without answering, and presently had collected enough wood for many fires.

"I'd like to see you lay a fire," he said.

She threw some of the small sticks together, then the larger ones, as she had seen the housemaid do at home. Then, embarrassed at his silent observation, she drew back.

"Of course I can't do it, if you watch me," she exclaimed.

"You can't do it anyhow, because you don't know the principle. The first thing a fire needs is air. It's done like this." He tore down and re-erected her structure.

If Miss Wilbur had followed her impulse, she would have kicked it down as he finished, but she managed a fine aloofness instead. He did not appear to notice her chin in the air.

"Yes," he observed as he rose from his knees, "it's a handy thing to know--how to lay a fire, and as you say, one is naturally grateful to the fellow who teaches one. I'm going to look for food. Keep a lookout for ships."

He had hardly gone when he came bounding back again, waving two small fish by the tails. "Got 'em," he shouted. "Dug out some ponds this morning, but never thought it would work, but here they are. Now we'll light the fire."

His excitement was contagious. She sprang up, held the skirt of her dressing-gown to shield the match, blew the flame, almost blew it out. Finally, with the help of both matches the fire was lit.

"I'm so hungry," she said. "Do you think they'll taste good?"

He did not answer. She could not but be impressed by the deftness with which he split and boned the fish, and the invention he displayed in evolving cooking utensils out of shells and sticks.

"You know," he said suddenly, "this fire must never go out. This will be your job. Sort of vestal-virgin idea."

The charge made her nervous. The responsibility was serious. During one of his absences she began to think the flame was dying down. She put in a stick. It blazed too quickly. A crash followed and one of the fish disappeared into the fire.

After a time she managed to drag it out, black and sandy. She dreaded his return. How could she make clear to him that it had not been her fault? She decided on a comic manner. Holding it up by the tail, she smiled at him. "Doesn't that look delicious?" she asked gayly.

His brow darkened. "All right, if you like them that way," he returned.

"Don't you think the other is large enough for two?"

His answer was to remove the other from the fire and to eat it himself.

Miss Wilbur watched him to the end, and then she could contain herself no longer. She had been extremely hungry.

"Upon my word," she said, "I've known a good many selfish men, but I never before saw one who would not have taken the bread out of his mouth to give to a hungry woman."

Her rescuer looked at her unshaken. "You don't think that was just?" he inquired.

"I am not talking of justice, but of chivalry," replied Miss Wilbur passionately. "Of consideration for the weak. You are physically stronger than I--"

"And I intend to remain so."

"At my expense?"

"If you fell ill, I should be sorry. If I fell ill, you would die." He turned away sharply, but half-way up to the beach thought better of it and returned.

"See here," he said, "I'm an irritable man, and a tired man. This whole thing isn't going to be easy for either of us. And what do we find, the first crack out of the box? That you are not only incompetent, but that you want to be social and pleasant over it. Great Scott! what folly! Well, if it's any satisfaction to you, I know I'm not behaving well either. But you don't seem aware of even that much, or of anything, indeed"--he smiled faintly--"except your own good looks."

He left her to meditate.

Battle, murder, and sudden death are not as great a shock to some people as their own failure to please. Miss Wilbur, being incapable of looking within for the cause of this phenomenon, looked at her companion. Evidently he _was_ a peculiar, nervous sort of a creature, and, after all, had he been so successful? He hardly came up to the desert-island standard set by the father of the Swiss Family Robinson. She reviewed him with a critical eye. He was a nice-looking young man of the clean-shaven type. He lacked the great air, she told herself, which was not surprising, since eighteen months before there had been nothing whatever to distinguish him from any of the other shrewd young men produced in such numbers by the State of Connecticut. But chance had waved her wand, and it had fallen to his lot to head a congenial band of patriots who, controlling a group of trolleys, had parted with them at a barefaced price to the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railway. Since this _coup_ he had rather rested on his laurels, spending most of his time with a classmate in New York, where he had acquired a tailor and had succeeded in getting himself elected to the directorate of The General Fruit Company--an organization which, as every Italian vender knows, deals in such miscellaneous commodities as bananas, hides, coffee, rubber, sugar, copper-mines, and narrow-gauge railroads along the Caribbean shores, with an argosy for transportation to Spokane, New Orleans, Baltimore, Boston, Bristol, or Bordeaux.

For some reason his mastery of the desert island was not complete. His race's traditional handiness seemed to be slightly in abeyance; perhaps because luck was against him, perhaps on account of a too pervasive feminine presence. But for whatever reason, things did not improve. Nothing came ashore from the wreck--not even when, after a small gale, it turned over and disappeared. The banana shelter leaked in the rain, and as Miss Wilbur sat steaming in the sunshine which immediately succeeded she felt inclined to attribute all her discomforts to Spens. He seemed to have no faculty whatever for evolving things out of nothing, which, she had always understood, was the great occupation of desert-island life. Their food continued to be bananas and cocoanuts, varied by an occasional fish; and, instead of being apologetic for such meagre fare, he seemed to think she ought to be grateful.

Now Miss Wilbur could have been grateful, if he had not roused her antagonism by his continual adverse criticism of herself. She wished to show him that she could be critical too; and so she sniffed at his fish, and took no interest in his roofing arrangements, and treated him, in short, exactly as the providing male should not be treated. Man cannot stoop to ask for praise, but he can eternally sulk if he does not get it. The domestic atmosphere of the island was anything but cordial.

After all, she used to say to herself, why should she labor under any profound sense of obligation? Even when he appeared to be considering her comfort she saw an ulterior motive. He came, for instance, one day, civilly enough, and pointed out a little row of white stones marking off a portion of the island.