Part 15

But I knew, too, that there was method in this madness. I was deliberately starting out to earn the wages of sin; and the wages of sin would be death. I must repeat that going to Stinson’s would be no more than a slow, convenient process of committing suicide. It would be committing suicide in a way for which Regina Barry would not have to feel herself responsible, as she would were I to use the revolver. Having brought so much on her, I was unwilling to bring more, even though my heart was hot against her.

My heart was hot against her—and yet I had to admit that she had been within her rights. When all was said that could be said in my favor, I had deceived her. I had let her go on for the best part of a year believing me to be what I was not, when during much of the time I could see that such a belief was growing perilous to her happiness. I had been a coward. I should have said from the first moment—the moment when she took me for my brother Jack—“I am a crook.” Then all would have been open and aboveboard between us; but as it was there was only one way out. Any other way—any way that would have allowed me to go on living longer than the time it would take drink to kill me—would have been unbearable.

The checkmate to these musings came when my eyes fell upon Lovey. He was at the door of the apartment, not only to welcome me, but to give me ocular demonstration that he had kept the faith while I had been away. It was the first time since the beginning of our association that I had left him for forty-eight hours; and that he was on his honor during those two days was no secret between us. The radiant triumph of his greeting struck into me like a stab.

For Lovey now was almost as completely reconstructed as I. I use the qualifying “almost” only because the longer standing of his habits and the harder conditions of his life had burnt the past more indelibly into him. Of either of us one could say, as the Florentines are reported to have said of Dante, “There goes a man who has been in hell”; but the marks of the experience had been laid more brutally on my companion than on me.

Otherwise he showed cheering signs of resuscitation. Neat, even at the worst of times, he was now habitually scrubbed and shaved, and as elegant as Colonel Straight’s establishment could turn him out. He had, in fact, for the hours he had free from washing windows, metamorphosed himself into the typical, self-respecting English valet, with a pride in his work sprung chiefly of devotion.

And for me he made a home. I mean by that that he was always there—something living to greet me, to move about in the dingy little apartment. As I am too gregarious, I may say too affectionate, to live contentedly alone, it meant much to me to have some one else within the walls I called mine, even if actual companionship was limited.

But whatever it was, I was about to destroy it. I could scarcely look him in the eyes; I could hardly say a word to him.

While unpacking my suit-case he said, timorously, “Y’ain’t sick, Slim?”

I began to change the suit I had been wearing for one that would attract less attention at Stinson’s.

“No, Lovey; I’m all right. I’m just—I’m just going out.”

And I went out. I went out without bidding the poor old fellow good-by, though I knew it was the last the anxious pale-blue eyes would see of me in that phase of comradeship. When next we met I should probably be drunk, and he would have come to get drunk in my company. It would then be a question as to which of us would hold out the longer.

And that was the thought that after an hour or two turned me back. I could throw my own life away, but I couldn’t throw away his. However reckless I might be on my own account, I couldn’t be so when I held another man’s fate in my hand.

Even so, I didn’t go back at once. Half-way to Stinson’s—I was on foot—I came to a sudden halt. It was as if the sense of responsibility toward Lovey wouldn’t allow me to go any farther. I said to myself that I must think the matter out—that I must find and would find additional justification for my course before going on.

To do that I turned into a chance hotel.

I like the wide hospitality of American hotels, where any tired or lonesome wayfarer can enter and sit down. I have never been a clubman. Clubs are too elective and selective for my affinities; they are too threshed and winnowed and refined. I have never in spirit had any desire to belong to a chosen few, since not only in heart, but in tastes and temperament, I belong to the unchosen many. I enjoy, therefore, the freedom and promiscuity of the lobby, where every Tom, Dick, and Harry has the same right as I.

Annoyed by the fact that a halt had been called in my errand of self-destruction, I began to ask myself why. The only answer that came to me was that this old man, this old reprobate, if one chose to call him so, cared for me. He had been giving me an affection that prompted him to the most vital sacrifice, to the most difficult kind of self-control.

Then suddenly that truth came back to me which Andrew Christian had pointed out a few months earlier, and which in the mean time had grown dim, that any true love is of God.

I was startled. I was awed. In saying these things I am trying only to tell you what happened in my inner self; and possibly when a man’s inner self has plumbed the depths like mine it means more to him to get a bit of insight than it does to you who have always been on the level. In any case this question rose within me: Was it possible that out of this old man, this drunkard, this murderer, cast off by his children, cast out by men, some feeble stream was welling up toward me from that pure and holy fountain that is God? Was it possible that this strayed creature had, through what he was giving me—me!—been finding his way back to the universal heart? If ever a human being had been dwelling in love he had been dwelling in it for a year and more; and there were the words, distilled out of the consciousness of the ages, and written for all time, “He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God.” Was it God that this poor, purblind old fellow had all unconsciously been bringing me, shedding round us, keeping us straight, making us strong, making us prosperous, helping us to fight our way upward?

I went back.

But on the way I had another prompting—one that took me into the office of a tourist company to consult time-tables and buy tickets.

“Lovey,” I said, when I got home, “we must both begin packing for all we’re worth. We’re leaving for Montreal to-night.”

“Goin’ to see your people, Slim, and stay in that swell hotel?”

“Not just now, Lovey. Later, perhaps. First of all we’re going for a month into the woods north of the Ottawa.”

His jaw dropped. “Into the woods?”

“Yes, old sport. You’ll like it.”

“Oh no, I won’t, Slim. I never was in no woods in my life—except London and New York. There’s one thing I never could abide, and that’s trees.”

“You won’t say that when you’ve seen real trees. We’ll shoot and fish and camp out—”

“Camp out? In a tent, like? Oh, I couldn’t, sonny! I’d ketch me death!”

“Then if you do we’ll come back; only, we’ve got to go now.”

“Why have we? It’s awful nice here in New York; and I don’t pay no attention to people that says it’s too hot.”

I made the appeal which I knew he would not resist. Laying my hand on his shoulder, I said: “Because, old man, I’m—I’m in trouble. I want to get away where—where I sha’n’t see—some one—again—and I need you.”

“It ain’t that girl, Slim? She—she haven’t turned you down?”

The words took me so much by surprise that I hadn’t time to get angry. All I could feel was a foolish, nervous kind of coolness.

“Lovey, what I want you to know I’ll tell you; and at present I’m telling you this: I’ve got to get out; I’ve got to get out quick; and I need you to buck me up. No one can buck me up like you.”

“Oh, if it’s that!” He would have followed me then to places more dreadful than the Canadian woods. “Will you take all your suits—or only just them new summer things?”

_CHAPTER XVIII_

Thus it happened that when war broke out I was deep in the wilderness. For more than a month I had had no contact with the outside world, not a letter, not a newspaper. I had escaped from New York without leaving an address, since Cantyre was absent. I had meant to write to him to have my letters forwarded, but I never had. Could I have guessed that war was to begin and to last so long I might have acted differently; but the name of Gavrilo Prinzip was still meaningless.

All sportsmen in my part of Canada know Jack Hiller’s, just as frequenters of the Adirondacks know Paul Smith’s. From Jack Hiller’s we struck farther in, to the rude camp where I had spent many a happy holiday when I was a lad. Two guides, an Indian and a half-breed, did the heavy work; and some long-forgotten, atavistic sporting strain in Lovey allowed him, groaningly and discontentedly, to enjoy himself.

But if I expected to find peace I saw I was mistaken. The distance I had put between myself and the house dominating Long Island Sound was only geographical. In spirit I was always back on that veranda, living through again the minutes of the long waiting. So the solitude was no solitude for me. And then one day the half-breed’s canoe shot over the waters of the lake, bringing supplies from Jack Hiller’s, with the news that the world had gone to war.

I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of men and women there are to whom the war came as a blessed opportunity to get away from uselessness or heartache. Stranded, purposeless, spiritless, futile, tired, empty, with something broken in the life or seemingly at an end, they suddenly found themselves called on to put forth energies they never knew they had, to meet needs they had never heard of.

“Son of man, can these dry bones live?” one might have been asking oneself a few years previously; and all at once there were multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision, energized into newness of being. Among them I was only one humble, stupid individual; but the summons was like that which came to the dust when it was bidden to be Adam and a man.

I have no intention of telling you in detail what happened to me between that August morning in 1914 and the day I stepped on board the boat at Liverpool more than two years later. There is no need. You know the outlines of that tale already. My case hardly differed externally from any other of the millions of cases you have heard about. The machine of war does not vary in its working much more than any other machine, except for the drama played in each man’s soul.

And of that I can say nothing. I don’t know why—but I cannot. Day and night I think of what I saw and heard and did in those two years, but some other language must be coined before I can begin to speak of it.

In this I am not singular; it is a rule to which I know few, if any, exceptions. I have heard returned soldiers on the lecture platform, telling part of the truth, and nothing but the truth, but never the whole truth nor the most vital truth. I have talked with some of them when the lectures were over, and a flare in the eye has said, “This is for public consumption; but you and I know that the realities are not to be put into words.”

One little incident I must give you, however, before I revert to what happened on the boat.

Having in that early August made my way to Ottawa with Lovey, and decided that I must respond at once to the country’s call, I expected a struggle with him, or something bitter in the way of protest. But in this I was mistaken. He, too, had been thinking the matter over, and, hard as it would be for him to see me do it, that quiet valor which practically no Englishman is without raised him at once to the level of his part.

“All right, Slim. It’s yer dooty to go, and mine to give ye up. We won’t say no more about that.”

“Thanks, Lovey, for making it so easy for me. I’ll never forget it as long as I live. Now there’s only one thing—”

“If it’s about me goin’ straight, sonny, while ye’re away, I’ll swear to God not to look so much as on the same side o’ the street as a drop o’ liquor till He brings ye back to me.”

“Then I believe He will bring me back, old fellow.”

“Sure He’ll bring ye back. Ye’ll be ’ome before Christmas; and, Slim, if it isn’t goin’ to cost ye too much money, won’t ye ’old on to them rooms so as I can keep our little place together, like, and ’ave it all clean and nice for you—?”

Having consented to this, I was able to make further provision for the old man when Cantyre joined me for a day or two in Montreal to bid me good-by. Lovey’s heroism was the sort of thing to draw out Cantyre’s sentimental vein of approval.

“I’ll take him and look after him, Frank. He’ll valet me till you come back. I’ve always wanted a man to do that sort of thing, and only haven’t had one because I thought it would look like putting on side. But now that he drops down to me out of heaven, as you might say, I’ll take him as a souvenir of you.”

_CHAPTER XIX_

All these interests had seemed far away from me during the two and a half years over there; but in proportion as I drew near Liverpool that morning they reformed themselves in the mists of the near future, as old memories come back with certain scents and scenes. Not till the damp, smoky haze of the great port was closing in round me did I realize that my more active part in the vast cosmic episode was at an end, and that I had come to the hour I had so often longed for—and was going home.

I was going home; and yet, for the minute, at any rate, I was not glad. There is always something painful in the taking up again of forsaken ties, however much we once loved them. It was like a repetition of the effort with which I had renewed my relations with my people. The actual has a way of seizing us in its tentacles and making us feel that it is the only life we ever truly led. There was a time when I seemed to forget that I had ever been anywhere but in the trenches. During the month or two that I was blind I got so used to the condition as to find it strange that I had ever seen. And always, in face of the fierce intensity of the present, the life in New York was remote, shadowy, and dim, as they say the life in prison becomes from its very monotony to those who look back on it after their release.

What it really amounted to was that during those two years I seemed to have grown in the size of my mental conceptions. Having been hurled into an existence gigantic, monstrous, in which there were no limits to either the devotion or the cruelty of human beings toward one another, all other ways of living had grown pale and small. If you can imagine yourself swirling through space, riding both zephyrs and tempests equally as a matter of course, you can understand how tame it would seem to be tied down to earth again, to go at nothing more stimulating than a walking pace. Otherwise typified, a lion that has been in a cage, and after two and a half years of free roving in the jungle finds itself returned to the cage again, would probably have the same sinking of the heart as I when I saw the hulk of the _Assiniboia_ loom up before me in the dock.

And then came that odd little incident of the nurse to connect me with the past by a new form of excitement. I have to confess that it was excitement largely compounded of wonder and distress. A dull ache told me that sensation was returning to a deadened nerve, and that where I had supposed there was paralysis at least there was going to be reaction and perhaps a pang.

For by this time I had passed through that process which is commonly known as “getting over it.” That is, a new self was living a new life on a new plane of existence. All that belonged to the period before I went to enlist at Ottawa was on the other side of a flood. I had not precisely forgotten; I had only died and become a transmigrated soul. Whatever was past was past. I might suffer from it; I might feel its consequences; but I couldn’t live it again. On the other hand, I was living vividly in the present. Not so much consciously or by word as because I couldn’t help it, I had merged everything I was into one dominating purpose with which, as far as I was aware, Regina Barry had nothing to do. The aims for which the war was being fought were my aims; I had no others. When these objectives were won my life, it seemed to me, would be over. It would melt away in that victory as dawn into sunrise. It would not be lost; it would only be absorbed—a spark in the blaze of noonday.

So mentally I was pressing forward. Though I could do no more fighting, I had been told that there was still work by which I could contribute to the object beside which no other object could be taken into consideration. I was being sent back for that reason. Not much had been told me as yet about what I was to do, but I understood that it was to be in connection with American public opinion. It will be remembered that at the end of 1916 the United States was not only not in the war, but it was still doubtful as to whether or not she ever would be. The hand of a cautious listener being on the pulse of a patient people, it was on the beat of that pulse that the issue turned.

I understood that, with my acquaintance ranging among high and low, I was to do what I could to make the pulse a little quicker. I might not be able to do much, but we had all learned the value of small individual contributions. It was argued that in proportion as the American people began to see on which side the balance of righteousness dipped, my game leg and my black patch, and the haggardness and gauntness and batteredness of my whole appearance, would have some appeal. The appeal would be the stronger for the fact that I was not an Englishman, but a Canadian—blood-brother to the man of his own continent, blood-brother to the Briton, blood-brother to the Frenchman, blood-son of the great ideals fathered by the Anglo-Saxon race, and in which all free peoples in the course of two hundred years had been made participants—and quick to spring to their defense. I was to be, therefore, a kind of unobtrusive, unaccredited ambassador to the man in the office and the street, with instructions to be inoffensive but persuasive.

And on this mission all my conscious thought was set. No hermit in the desert was ever more entirely self-dedicated to the saving of his soul than I to the quiet preaching of this new crusade among men like Ralph Coningsby and Stephen Cantyre and Beady Lamont and Headlights and Daisy and Momma and Mouse, and any others with whom I should come in contact. In fulfilling this task I wanted no one to disturb or distract me; and here at the very outset was some one who might do both.

_CHAPTER XX_

After having found my cabin and seen to my belongings I hobbled up on deck once more, to verify my vision of the Canadian nurse’s uniform. I discovered the uniform in two or three instances, but in none that corresponded to the figure too little to be tall and too tall to be considered little I had watched receding down the deck.

As for the costume itself, it was not difficult to find myself beside one of the ladies who wore it—a beautiful, grave woman, of the type of Bouguereau’s Consolatrice, who, with hands resting on the deck rail, was looking down at the movement on the dock.

“There seem to be a number of nurses going back,” I observed, after an introductory word or two.

“There are three in our party—myself and the two over there.”

The two over there were two I had already seen, neither of them being my pilot of a half-hour previously.

“I thought I saw another,” I threw off, casually.

“I believe there is one—an American girl from Lady Rideover’s hospital at Taplow.”

As I had just come from Lady Rideover’s hospital at Taplow, and Lady Rideover herself was my sister, I suggested, without mentioning the relationship, that in this speculation there was some mistake.

“She may not have come directly from there,” the Consolatrice admitted; “but I know she was with Lady Rideover six months ago.”

“But six months ago I was with Lady Rideover myself.”

“Well, she was there then.”

“But I should have seen her if she had been.”

She turned slowly round on me, with deep, kind eyes. “Would you? You could see all the time?”

I had forgotten that. There had been two months when I hadn’t seen at all. Any one might have come and gone during that time.

Remarking on the inconvenience of having no list of passengers, I asked my companion if she knew the young lady’s name.

“No; but I can inquire of my friends. They may know.”

Having crossed to speak to the nurses on the other side of the deck, she came back without the information.

“But Miss Prynne,” she added, “that’s the short one, says that the young lady came over about two years ago with Lady Rideover’s sister, Miss Melbury, of Montreal.”

I withdrew to ponder. I had been in continuous if desultory communication with my sisters during all my time abroad, and no mention of Regina Barry had ever escaped either. I had not supposed that they knew one another. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that I had been under the same roof with her at Taplow and had not been aware of it. And here she was on board the ship on which I was returning home, and able to come to my aid at a minute when I wanted help.

I had often wished that some of my New York correspondents would speak of her, but no one ever had. Except in the case of Cantyre this was hardly strange, for—apart from Hilda Grace, who never wrote to me—no one knew that Regina Barry and I had meant anything to each other. If Cantyre had spoken of her, it would have been on his own account; but confidential as he was in private talk, his letters were never more than a few terse lines. So I had rather bitterly imagined her as going on with the testing of other men, as she had tested Jim Hunter, Cantyre, and me—trying them and finding them wanting. In ungenerous moments I went so far as to hope that Nemesis might overtake her in some tremendous passion in which she herself would be tried and tossed aside.

It was, however, the second day out before I actually came face to face with her. Her absence from the deck had been part of the mystery. Having swung into the Mersey, we remained there all Sunday night—it was a Sunday we had gone on board—and much of Monday. Accepting as necessary the secrecy which in war-time enshrouds an Atlantic voyage, the passengers had made themselves as comfortable as the conditions permitted, and taken air and exercise by promenading the decks. There could have been no better opportunity for finding familiar faces, but, apart from one or two distant acquaintances, I saw none. The three nurses’ uniforms I had noted already were continually about; but I never found the fourth.

And then on Tuesday, after we had lost sight of the Irish coast, there was another queer little incident. As I could walk but little, I had been reading in the music-room. Tired of doing that and eager to continue my search for the missing uniform, I had limped to the doorway, screened by a heavy portière, leading out toward the companionway. But while I stood turning up the collar of my overcoat the portière was suddenly pulled aside, and we were before each other, with a suggestion of a similar occurrence three and a half years before.