Part 14

Considering it sufficient to make their adieux to Mrs. Barry, they left us undisturbed in a nook of one of the verandas. Here we were out of sight of any of the avenues and pathways to the house, and Mrs. Barry was sufficiently in sympathy with our desire to be alone not to send any one in search of us. On the lawn robins were hopping, and along the edge of shorn grass the last foxgloves made upright lines of color against the olive-green scrub-oak. Far down through the trees one caught the silvery glinting of water.

The sounds of voices and motor wheels having died away, Miss Barry said, languidly: “I think they must be all gone. They’ll say I’m terribly rude to keep myself out of sight. But it’s lovely here, isn’t it? And this is such a cozy spot in which to smoke and have coffee. I read here, too, and— Oh, dear, what’s happening?”

It was then that the little accident which was to play so large a part in my life occurred. She had leaned forward from her wicker chair to set her empty coffee-cup on the table. As she did so the string of pearls which she wore at the opening of her simple white dress loosened itself and slipped like a tiny snake to the floor of the veranda. From a corresponding chair on the other side of the table I sprang up and stooped. When I raised myself with the pearls in my right hand I slipped them into my pocket.

Between the fingers of my left hand I held a lighted cigar. Bareheaded, I was wearing white flannels and tennis shoes. Now that the moment had come, I felt extraordinarily cool—as cool as on the night when I had slipped this string of pearls into my pocket before. I looked down and smiled at her. Leaning back in her chair, she looked up and smiled at me.

I shall always see her like that—in white with a slash of silk of the red of her lips somewhere about her waist, and a ribbon of the same round her dashing Panama hat. Her feet in little brown shoes were crossed. With an elbow on the arm of her chair, she held a small red fan out from her person, though she wasn’t actively using it.

“What does that mean?” she asked, idly, at last.

“Doesn’t it remind you of anything?”

“No—of nothing.”

“Didn’t you ever see any one put these pearls into his pocket before?”

“Why, no!” She added, as if an idea had begun to dawn in the back of her memory, “Not in that way.”

“Oh, I remember. You didn’t see him put them in at all. You only saw him take them out.”

The smile remained on her features, but something puzzled gave it faint new curves.

“Why—”

“It was like this, wasn’t it?”

I drew out the pearls and threw them on the table.

She bent forward slightly, still smiling, like a person watching with bewildered intensity a conjurer’s trick.

“Why—”

“Only your gold-mesh purse was with them—and your diamond bar-pin—and your rings.”

“Why—who, who on earth could have told you?”

I, too, continued to smile, consciously wondering if I should be as calm as this in the hour of death.

“Who do you think?”

“It wasn’t Elsie Coningsby?”

“No. She was in the house, but—”

“How did you know that?” She uttered a mystified laugh. “She _was_ there! It was one of the nights she stayed with me when papa and mamma were down here superintending some changes before we could move in. But I never told her anything about it.”

“Why didn’t you—when she was right on the spot?”

“Oh, because.”

The smile disappeared. She stopped looking up at me to turn her eyes toward the foxgloves and scrub-oak.

“Yes? Because—what?”

“Because I promised—that man—I wouldn’t.”

“Why should you have made him such a promise?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Just at the time I was—I was sorry for him.”

“And aren’t you sorry for him still?”

She looked up at me again with one of her bright challenges.

“Look here! Do you know him?”

“Tell me first what I asked you. Aren’t you sorry for him still?”

“I dare say I am. I don’t know.”

“What did you—what did you—think of him at the time?”

“I thought he was—terrible.”

“Terrible—in what way?”

“I don’t know that I can tell you in what way. It was so awful to think that a man who had had some advantages should have sunk to that. If he’d been a real burglar—I mean a professional criminal—I should have been afraid of him; but I shouldn’t have had that sensation of something meant for better things that had been debased.”

“Didn’t he tell you he was hungry?”

The smile came back—faintly.

“You seem to know all about it, don’t you? It’s the strangest thing I ever knew. No one in this world could have told you but himself. Yes, he did say he was hungry; but then, a man who’d been what he must have been shouldn’t have got into that condition. He’d stolen into our pantry, poor creature, and drunk the cooking-wine. He told me that—” Without rising, her figure became alert with a new impulse. “Oh, I see! You do know him. He was an Englishman. I remember that.”

I placed myself fully before her. “No, he wasn’t an Englishman.”

“He spoke like one.”

“So do I, for the matter of that.”

“Then he was a Canadian. Was he?”

“He was a Canadian.”

“Oh, then that accounts for it. But you did puzzle me at first. But how did you come to meet him? Was it at that Down and Out Club that papa and Mr. Christian are so interested in? You go to it, too, don’t you? I think Stephen Cantyre said you did.”

“Yes, I go to it, too.”

She grew pensive, resting her chin on a hand, with her elbow on the arm of the chair.

“I suppose it’s all right; but I never can understand how men can be so merciful to one other’s vices. It looks as if they recognized the seed of them within themselves.”

“Probably that’s the reason.”

“Women don’t feel like that about one another.”

“They haven’t the same cause.”

“I hope he’s doing better—that man—and picking up again.”

“He is.”

She asked, in quite another tone, “You’re not going back to New York to-morrow, are you?”

“I’m not sure—yet.”

“Hilda said she was going to try to persuade you and the Grahams to stay till Tuesday. If you can stay, mamma and I were planning—”

I put myself directly in front of her, no more than a few feet away, my hands in the pockets of my jacket.

“Look at me again. Look at me well. Try to recall—”

Slowly, very slowly, she struggled to her feet. The color went out of her lips and the light from her eyes as she backed away from me in a kind of terror.

“What—what—are you trying to make me—to make me understand?”

“Think! How should I know all that I’ve been saying if—”

“If the man himself didn’t tell you. But he did.”

“No, he didn’t. No one had to tell me.”

She reached the veranda rail, which she clutched with one hand, while the other, clenched, was pressed against her breast.

“You don’t mean—”

“Yes, I do mean—”

“Oh, you can’t?”

“Why can’t I.”

“Because—because it isn’t—it isn’t possible! You”—she seemed to be shivering—“you could never have—”

“But I did.”

She gasped brokenly. “You? You?”

I nodded. “Yes—I.”

I tried to tell her, but I suppose I did it badly. Put into a few bald words the tale was not merely sordid, it was low. I could give it no softening touch, no saving grace. It was more beastly than I had ever imagined it.

Fortunately she didn’t listen with attention. The means were indifferent to her when she knew the end. For the minute, at any rate, she saw me not as I stood there, clean and in white, but as I had been a year before, dirty and in rags. But she saw more than that. With every word I uttered she saw the ideal she had formed broken into shivers, like a shattered looking-glass.

She interrupted my preposterous story to gasp, “I can’t believe it!”

“But it’s true.”

“Then you mustn’t mind if—if I put you to a test. Did you—did you write anything while you were there?”

“I printed something—in the same kind of letters you’ve seen at the bottom of architects’ plans.”

“And how did you come to do it?”

I recounted the circumstance, at which she nodded her head in verification.

“So that was how you knew the words you repeated to me a few months ago?”

“That was how. I said there were men in the world different from any you’d seen yet; and I told you to wait.”

She made a tremendous effort to become again the daring mistress of herself which she generally was. She smiled, too, nervously, and with a kind of sickening, ghastly whiteness.

“Funny, isn’t it? There are men in the world different from any I’d seen before that time. I’ve—I’ve waited—and found out.”

Before I could utter a rejoinder to this she said, quite courteously, “Will you excuse me?”

I bowed.

With no further explanation she marched down the length of the veranda—carrying herself proudly, placing her dainty feet daintily, walking with that care which people show when they are not certain of their ability to walk straight—and entered the house.

I didn’t know why she had gone; but I knew the worst was over. Though I felt humiliation to the core of the heart’s core, I also felt relief.

With a foot dangling, I sat sidewise on the veranda rail and waited. Glancing at my watch, I saw it was not yet four, and I had lived through years since I had climbed the hill at one. My sensations were comparable only to those of the man who has been on trial for his life and is waiting for the verdict.

I waited nervously, and yet humbly. Now that it was all over, it seemed to me that the bitterness of death was past. Whatever else I should have to go through in life, nothing could equal the past quarter of an hour.

The sensations I hadn’t had while making my confession began to come to me by degrees. Looking back over the chasm I had crossed, I was amazed to think I had had the nerve for it. I trembled reminiscently; the cold sweat broke out on my forehead. It was terrible to think that at that very minute she was in there weighing the evidence, against me and in my favor.

Mechanically I relighted the cigar that had gone out. Against me and in my favor! I was not blind to the fact that in my favor there was something. I had gone down, but I had also struggled up again; and you can make an appeal for the man who has done that.

She was long in coming back. I glanced at my watch, and it was nearly half past four. Her weighing of the evidence had taken her half an hour, and it was evidently not over yet. Well, juries were often slow in coming to a verdict; and doubtless she was balancing the extenuating circumstance that I had struggled up against the main fact that I had gone down.

What she considered her ideal had during the past few weeks been gradually transferring itself from her mind to my own. She wouldn’t marry a man she couldn’t trust; she wouldn’t marry a man who hadn’t what she called spirit; she wouldn’t marry a milksop. But she had well-defined—and yet indefinable—conceptions as to how far in spirit a man should go, and of the difference between being a milksop and a man of honor. She might find it hard to admit that the pendulum of human impulse that swung far in one direction might swing equally far in the other; and therein would lie my danger.

But I must soon know. It was ten minutes of five. The jury had been out more than three-quarters of an hour.

A new quality was being transmuted into the atmosphere. It was as if the lightest, flimsiest veil had been flung across the sun. In the distant glinting of the sea, which had been silver, there came a tremulous shade of gold. The foxgloves bowed themselves like men at prayer. The robins betook themselves to the branches. From unseen depths of the scrub-oak there was an occasional luscious trill, as the time for the singing of birds wasn’t over yet.

Round me there was silence. I might have been sitting at the door of an empty house. I listened intently for the sound of returning footsteps, but none came.

At a quarter past five a chill about the heart began to strike me. I had been waiting more than an hour. Could it be possible that...?

It would be the last degree of insult. Whatever she did, she wouldn’t subject me to that. It would be worse than her glove across the face. It was out of the question. I couldn’t bear to think of it. Rather than think of it, I went over the probabilities that she would come back with the smile of forgiveness. It would doubtless be a tearful smile, for tears were surely the cause of her delay. When she had controlled them, when she was able to speak and bid me be of good comfort, I should hear the tap of her high heels coming down the uncarpeted stairway. No red Indian ever listened for the tread of a maid’s moccasins on forest moss so intently as I for that staccato click.

But only the birds rewarded me, and the cries of boys who had come to bathe on the beach below. There was more gold in the light; more trilling in the branches; a more pungent scent from the trees, the flowers, and the grass; and that was all.

It was half past five; it was a quarter to six; it was six.

At six o’clock I knew.

My hat was lying on a chair near by. I picked it up—and went.

I went, not by the avenue and the path, but down the queer, rickety flights of steps that led from one jutting rock to another over the face of the cliff, till I reached the beach. It was a broad, whitish, sandy beach, with a quietly lapping tide almost at the full. Full tide was marked a few feet farther up by a long, wavy line of seaweed and other jetsam.

It was the delicious hour for bathing. As far as one could see in either direction there were heads bobbing in the water and people scrambling in and out. Shrill cries of women and children, hoarse shouts of men, mingled with the piping of birds overhead. Farther out than the bathers there were rowboats, and beyond the rowboats sails. In the middle of the Sound a steamer or two trailed a lazy flag of smoke. Far, far to the south and the west a haze like that round a volcano hung over New York. I should return there next day to face new conditions. I only wished to God that it could be that night.

The new conditions were, briefly, three: I could use the revolver still lying in my desk; or I could begin to drink again; or, like the bull wounded in the ring, I could seek shelter in the dumb sympathy of the Down and Out.

The last seemed to me the least attractive. I had climbed that hill, and found it led only to a precipice that I had fallen over.

Neither did the first possibility charm me especially. Apart from the horror of it, it was too brief, too sudden, too conclusive. I wanted the gradual, the prolonged.

It was the second course to which my mind turned with the nearest approach to satisfaction. Christian had told me that some of my severest tussles lay ahead; and now I had come to the one in which I should go under. In that the flesh at least would get its hour of compensation, when all was said and done.

At the foot of Mrs. Grace’s steps I paused to recall Christian’s words of a few days previously:

“In love and truth together there’s a power which, if we have the patience to wait for its working out, will solve all difficulties and meet all needs.”

I had tried that—love and truth together!—and at the result I could only laugh.

My immediate fear was lest Mrs. Grace and the Grahams would be on the veranda, vaguely expecting to offer me their congratulations. When half-way up the steps I heard voices and knew that they were there. So be it! I had faced worse things in my life; and now I could face that.

But as I advanced up the lawn I saw them moving about and talking with animation. As soon as Mrs. Grace caught sight of me she hurried down the steps, meeting me as I passed among the flower-beds. She held a newspaper marked Extra in her hand, and seemed to have forgotten that I had love-affairs.

“Have you seen this? Colt, the chauffeur, was at the station and brought it back. It’s just come down from New York.”

Glad of anything that would distract attention from myself, I took the paper in my hand and pretended to be reading it. All I got was the vague information that some one had been assassinated—some man and his morganatic wife. What did it matter to me? What did it matter to any one? Of all that was printed there, only five syllables took possession of my memory—and that because they were meaningless, “Gavrilo Prinzip!”

I was repeating them to myself as I handed the paper back, and we exchanged comments of which I have no recollection. More comments were passed with the Grahams, and then, blindly, drunkenly, I made my way to my room.

There I found nothing to do less classic than to sit at the open window, to look over at the red-and-yellow house on the opposite hill. It was my intention to think the matter out, but my brain seemed to have stopped working. Nothing came to me but those barbaric sounds, that kept repeating themselves with a kind of hiss: “Gavrilo Prinzip! Gavrilo Prinzip!”

From my stupefied scanning of the paper I hadn’t grasped the fact that a name utterly unknown that morning was being flashed round the world at a speed more rapid than that of the earth round the sun. Still less did I suspect that it was to become in its way the most sinister name in history. I kept repeating it only as you repeat senseless things in the minutes before you go to sleep.

“Gavrilo Prinzip! Gavrilo Prinzip! Gavrilo Prinzip!”

_CHAPTER XVII_

I came back as Major Melbury, of one of the Canadian regiments.

It was in November, 1916, that I was invalided home to Canada, lamed and wearing a disfiguring black patch over what had been my left eye.

There were other differences of which I can hardly tell you in so many words, but which must transpire as I go on. Briefly, they summed themselves up in the fact that I had gone away one man and I was coming back another. My old self had not only been melted down in the crucible, but it had been stamped with a new image and superscription. It was of a new value and a new currency, and, I think I may venture to add, of that new coinage minted in the civil strife of mankind.

The day of my sailing from Liverpool was exactly two years four months and three weeks from that on which I had last seen Regina Barry; and because it was so I must tell you at once of an incident that occurred at the minute when I stepped on board.

Having come up the long gangway easily enough, I found that at the top, where passengers and their friends congregate, my difficulties began.

When my left eye had been shot out the right had suffered in sympathy, and also from shock to the retina. For a while I had been blind. Rest and care in the hospital my sister, Mabel Rideover, maintained at Taplow had, however, restored the sight of my right eye; and now my trouble was only with perspective. People and things crowded on one another as they do in the vision of a baby. I would dodge that which was far away, and allow myself to bump into objects quite near me.

As I stepped on deck I had a minute or two of bewilderment. There were so many men more helpless than I that whatever care there was to give was naturally bestowed on them. Moreover, most of those who thronged the top of the gangway had too many anxieties of their own to notice that a man who at worst was only half blind didn’t know which way to turn.

But I did turn—at a venture. The venture took me straight into a woman holding a baby in her arms, whom I crushed against the nearest cabin wall. The woman protested; the baby screamed. I was about, in the rebound, to crash into some other victim when I felt from behind me a hand take me by the arm. An almost invisible guide began to pilot me through the crowd. All I caught sight of was a Canadian nurse’s uniform.

It is one of the results of the war that men, who are often reduced to the mere shreds of human nature, grow accustomed to being taken care of by women, who remain the able-bodied ones.

“Thanks,” I laughed, as the light touch pushed me along, slightly in advance. “You caught me right in the nick of time. I can see pretty well with my good eye, only I can’t measure distances. They tell me that will come by degrees.”

Even though occupied with other thoughts, I was surprised that my rescuer didn’t respond to my civility, for another result of the war is the ease with which the men and women who have been engaged in it get on terms of natural acquaintanceship. When artificial barriers are removed, it is extraordinary how quickly we go back to primitive human simplicity. Social and sex considerations have thus been minimized to a degree which, it seems to me, will make it difficult ever to re-establish them in their old first place. They say it was an advance in civilization when we ceased to see each other as primarily males and females and knew we were men and women. Possibly the war will lead us a step farther still and reveal us as children of one family.

That a nurse shouldn’t have a friendly word for a partly incapacitated man struck me, therefore, as odd, though my mind would not have dwelt on the circumstance if she hadn’t released my arm as abruptly as she had taken it. Having helped me to reach a comparatively empty quarter of the deck, she had counted, apparently, on the slowness and awkwardness of my movements to slip away before I could turn round.

When I managed this feat she was already some yards down the length of the deck, hurrying back toward the crowd from which we had emerged. I saw then that she was too little to be tall and too tall to be considered little. Moreover, she carried herself proudly, placing her dainty feet daintily, and walking with that care which people display when they are not certain of their ability to walk straight. Reaching one of the entrances, she went in, exactly as I had seen a woman pass through a doorway two years four months and three weeks before.

I was sure it was she—and yet I told myself it couldn’t be. I told myself it couldn’t be, for the reason that I had been deceived so frequently before that I had grown distrustful of my senses. All through the intervening time I had been getting glimpses of a slight figure here, of an alert movement there, of the poise of a head, of the wave of a hand—that for an instant would make my heart stop beating; but in the end it had meant nothing but the stirring of old memories. In this case I could have been convinced if the coincidence had not put too great a strain on all the probabilities.

I was to learn later that there was no coincidence; but I must tell my story in its right order.

The right order takes me back to my return to New York, after my week-end at Mrs. Grace’s, on the morning of June 29, 1914.

During the two or three hours of jogging down the length of Long Island in the train I tried to keep out of my mind all thoughts but one; having deposited my bags at my rooms, I should go to Stinson’s.

With regard to this intention I was clearly aware of a threefold blend of reaction.

First, there was the pity of it. I could take a detached view of this downfall, just as if I had heard of it in connection with Beady Lamont or old Colonel Straight. Though I should be only a man dropped in the ranks, while they would have been leaders, the grief of my comrades over my collapse would be no less sincere.

But by tearing my mind away from that aspect of the case I reverted to the satisfaction at being in the gutter, of which the memories had never ceased to haunt me. I cannot expect to make you, who have always lived on the upper levels, understand this temptation; I can only tell you that for men who have once been outside the moral law there is a recurrent tugging at the senses to get there again. I once knew an Englishman who had lived in the interior of Australia and had “gone black.” On his return to make his home in England he was seized with so consuming a nostalgia for his black wives and black children that in the end he went back to them. Something like this was the call I was always hearing—the call of Circe to go down.